


we've seen beyond the stars, we can show you all the scars

by CloudDreamer



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Bonesaw-Typical Human Experimentation, Brutal Murder, Cannibalism, Everyone Is Gay, F/F, Implied Deadnaming, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, Local Lesbian Comes To Terms With Gender Identity; Death Toll In The Millions, M/M, Meaningful Haircut, Nonbinary Bonesaw, Not Canon Compliant, Slaughterhouse Nine-Typical Violence, Team as Family, Temporary Character Death, Trans Female Siberian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-05
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:35:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 22,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23014855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: The Slaughterhouse Nine is a rotating group of supervillains murdering their way across North America and, occasionally, beyond.The Slaughterhouse Nine is going to be responsible for the apocalypse.The Slaughterhouse Nine is in town, and they're recruiting.The Slaughterhouse Nine is a family and a home for the most fucked up capes out there. Joining them means living with a target on your back, but it also means having a support network that will literally die for you. It means indulging in every desire and saying fuck you to a world that's shamed you for as much as existing.It means being remembered.Or:An AU where the Slaughterhouse Nine capes actually like each other, set at various points across their entire twenty six year run.
Relationships: Ashley Stillons | Damsel of Distress/Cherie Vasil | Cherish, Jacob | Jack Slash/Number Man | Harbinger, May | March/Tori (Ward)/Lily | Flechette | Foil, Rebecca Costa-Brown | Alexandria/William Manton | Siberian
Comments: 76
Kudos: 69





	1. Jacob

“King’s dead,” the boy formerly known as Jacob said. He held hands with Harbringer, in the same awkward way that most twelve year olds who’ve never been in a relationship before do. Most twelve year olds, however, do not start their first relationships by murdering their boss/father figure, and aren’t covered in drying blood. 

“Oh really?” ‘King’ said from right behind them. “Jacob, you always did have such an imagination.” 

“Cut that out, Screamer,” he said, rolling his eyes. “And it’s Jack Slash now.” 

“That’s a dumb name,” she said, with her own voice. She laid sprawled across the sofa, earbuds in and at an angle that made her look like she was about to fall off entirely, right next to a coffee table with dozens of different weapon. Mostly knives, but there were a handful of guns too. She was supposedly cleaning them, but based on the discarded bloody rag halfway across the room, Jack figured she'd given up on that pretty quickly. “You’re dumb. We can’t be the Slaughterhouse _Nine_ I’d there’s only eight of us. That’s how maths work. Harbringer, tell him that’s how maths work.” 

Harbringer opened his mouth, but no sound came out. 

“Yes, Screamer, eight does not equal nine. I know this because I’m a fucking nerd and have to tell everyone all the time—“ 'Harbringer' said. 

Jack Slash strolled over to the sofa, dragging Harbringer with him, to stand above her and flicked a pocket knife with just enough power that the cord of her earbuds were cut. 

“Cut it out, Screamer.” 

“Is that a pun? Are you doing puns now? That's laaaaaaaaame.” 

“King is dead. Harbringer and I killed him. So we’re in charge now, and I think it’s time for a family meeting.” 

Screamed rolled over to a more stable position, sat up, and scowled, before she processed the dead serious expression of both of their faces. Also, the amount of blood. 

“Damn, you’re serious?” 

They nodded together, Harbringer with a dark determination and Jack Slash with an arrogant smirk.

“Wow. That asshat sure had it coming, but I didn’t think you two babies had it in you.” 

“You ass,” Jack Slash said, but he didn’t stop grinning. Screamer was just sort of like that. She was seventeen, but she’d been a cape since she was eleven. Her purple crop top went up pretty high over her stomach, and her denim shorts were cut way too short. One of her eyes was covered in a black patch. Her hair was an ugly mustard yellow and she had almost a dozen different piercings. Nine, to be specific.

“Wait, what’re we gonna do about Gray Boy?” 

“I’m thinking we try talking, and if talking doesn’t work, we run like hell.” 

The other, still surviving, members of the Nine, excluding Gray Boy because he was fucking terrifying, heard Screamer’s voice saying, “Jacob, who’s being a dramatic bitch and has a new name, and Harbringer are back. They killed King or some shit? Family meeting? Lmao. Come bully them with me.” 

“You’re crazy,” Screamer said. “You think you can run a villain crew better than the old man? Aren’t you, I dunno, nine years old?” 

“I don’t think I can run a villain crew. I think I can run _the_ villain crew.” 

“You wanna take over the world or some shit? Cuz I’m pretty sure everyone who’s tried that so far has failed miserably. Except the PRT, maybe, they seem to be doing great.” 

“Not conquering. You know the Endbringers?” 

“I’m not an idiot like you. Yeah. What, you wanna turn into giant monsters? Cuz I’m down for that. I call dibs on tentacles.” 

“How about nine normally sized monsters?” 

“We’re sticking with the number gimmick?” Harbringer asked, and he dropped Jack’s hand to go looking for a notepad and a pen. For a twelve year old with no formal education, he had good handwriting, a fact that Screamer, whose messy scrawl was nigh illegible to most people, including her, was definitely not jealous of. 

“Of course we’re sticking with the number gimmick. It’s important to have brand recognition.” 

Harbringer flicked to a fresh page as the other four capes filed in. Crimson was first, as he’d been taking a nap in the upstairs of the small house that King had bought to serve as their base. It took Psychosomatic and Nyx a bit longer to pull themselves away from bickering about who was going to feed Gray Boy from in front of the very firmly locked basement door, but Screamer could get rather insistent. Breed came in last; he’d been off doing the grocery shopping. In this case, that meant actual bags of groceries, but that could occasionally refer to checking in on his minions at the local graveyards. 

“So, what’s this about?” Crimson asked, a low sort of growl to his voice. “Old man dead, you think you can boss us around?” 

“Yes, but don't worry. I’m not going to be the same sort of leader,” Jack Slash declared, and the rest of the group settled into a semicircle around him. Even Screamer sat up from her comfortable attention. He had this natural draw. “In fact, if anyone wants to leave now, go ahead. I won’t stop you.” 

Nobody moved, though Harbringer looked like he was considering it. 

“Actually, put that down as a rule. Nobody can stop anyone else from leaving or force anyone else to join. Anyone who leaves or doesn’t join has, let’s say, a five day grace period before we fight them.” 

“Join?” Crimson asked. “We’re gonna recruit others?” 

He looked curious at that. Poor bastard was lonely, Jack figured. The Case 53s he’d met all had that same sort of emptiness in them. Whatever it was that’d made them, it left them as fucked in the head as any trigger event could. 

“Yeah. We gotta have nine. You gotta think about the marketing.” 

“Oh my gawd,” Screamer said. 

“Rule two is that we protect each other. King kept us in line with threats and violence, only respecting the people we were fighting. We’re going to flip that dynamic on its head. Only people in the world that matters from now on? It’s us.” 

“I can get behind that,” Nyx said.

“Rule three is that there aren’t any more rules. We’re going to be legends, and legends don't let anyone tell them what to do.” 

“What're you thinking?” Breed asked as he shoved a fresh bag of flour in the pantry. 

“You hear of Case One?” 

Everyone nodded. The Siberian was legendary among villains. Nobody had ever before survived a fight against the full force of the Big Four and got away unscathed. She’d killed Hero, and word on the street was she’d broken through Alexandria’s invincibility, maiming her. 

“You want us to be like her? Going up against the best of the best, winning, and disappearing just to show up and wreck havoc again? I have to admit, it sounds fun,” Nyx said. Psychosoma nodded. The two fought over pretty much every detail, not because they really hated each other or were particularly hard to please, but because they were built for fighting.

“If we get big, maybe we’ll get lucky, and someone’ll kill Grey Boy before he turns on us,” Psychosoma added, with a hint of his accent. Breed seemed amiable enough, and Crimson looked at the rest of his teammates with what had to be a new light.

“Speaking of the Siberian,” Harbringer added, making a few calculations. “I do believe that, based on her established pattern of appearances, she’ll show up in this general region in three days. If you let me drive, we could meet up with her. Jack, if you do the talking, I do believe she would be amenable to joining us.” 

“Oh, fuck yeah!” Screamer said. “Road trip! Road trip!” 

Nyx couldn’t help but join in the chant, and by that point, there was nothing Jack could've done to curb the group’s enthusiasm, even if he'd wanted to. He’d been thinking of getting them mobile already, and a road trip to recruit the world’s most infamous villain for their to-be-legendary team wounded like a fantastic start.

“Alright,” he acquiesced, with a grin. “The Slaughterhouse Nine is going on tour!”


	2. Riley

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for child abuse.

The man and his seven companions approached her. His knife was aimed towards the ground, but she knew how fast he could swing it up, slice her open. She knew it, because she understood the way his body was moving, how all the pieces fit together, and because she’d seen him take the people in the street apart. Those people belonged to this place. They were at the stores her parents shopped at, who walked past her everyday. She'd seen them, and he'd made them into bits.

Except, instead of cutting her open too, he kneeled down in front of her. 

“You in there, girl?” 

She nodded. She was stitching the cut on her head closed without looking, or even moving at all. It stung, but she knew it’d do more damage if she let the blood flow. She knew it in the same way she knew the shape of his muscles indicated years of practice. Not training in a gym for fitness and aesthetic but from running. He was scars, from head to toe, and she could fix them. She could replace the broken bits and make them better. 

She’d seen something. It was bigger than she could even comprehend; its vastness dwarfed her and everything she’d ever done. It faded away as quickly as it’d come, but the fear remained. The tininess. The insignificance. It was like the worst nights at home, when she’d have to spend hours cleaning up her own injuries because her parents didn’t care enough to fix the damage they’d caused. All the split lips and black eyes. 

She’d never need to worry about that ever again. When the man and his friends had come, they’d stopped the pain. They’d stopped it forever, just as they'd stopped moments afterwards. 

She’d stood, shaking limbs and scared eyes in the hallway, because despite everything she’d watched happen at the window, with her face pressed against the trembling glass that threatened to pierce her skull like it had their next door neighbors' two year old son, disappointing her mother was the scariest thing she could imagine. Even now, when a well of knowledge filled a hole she hadn’t realized was empty, informing her of all the ways a human could die and how she could— had to— stop it or twist it, she hid her head more from those similar shadows. 

And she’d stood into the way of the black and white woman, whose nails had almost dug straight into her skull— She knew what would’ve happened if the woman hadn’t suddenly stopped, invincibility spreading and covering her like a warm blanket despite her unnaturally cold body, in morbid detail. 

She’d broken into one hundred pieces, and then she’d come to with the people who’d hurt her before dead and the people who she’d expected to hurt her now standing in a semicircle around her, where she’d fallen against the wall. She turned and felt the raggedy blanket she kept hidden for the nights she was locked out wrapped around her. She saw compassion, of all things, in their eyes. “Yeah,” she said. 

“Why…?” 

She didn’t know how to ask the question. Why kill everyone else and leave her alive? She’s just a kid. They’d cut down the heroes who’d came to fight them with such ease. She hadn’t known how easy it was to make someone hurt just then. How to take them apart. She still didn’t know how to give a list of instructions, to explain, but she thought— if she could just see the bodies, pull them apart, then she’d be able to know how they were stopped in their tracks. How these monsters had done it. 

_Be a good girl, Riley._ Those were her mother's words. _Be a good girl and die for me._

She hadn't said the last bit, but she'd meant it. 

“Dunno. Carry to explain, Sibby?” 

The woman who was a study in contrasts snarled, shaking her head. Her curved stripes crossed her entire exposed body, and her hair cascaded behind her in waves. Beautiful and alien. She remembered the warm taste of the woman’s power reaching through her, making her unstoppable, just as she remembered the frost of her touch. 

“I guess she doesn’t know either. Do you know why, little girl?” 

“I’m not,” she said, and she almost spat the words out of her mouth along with one of her front, “a little girl.”

“Oh? What are you then?” 

Little girls hurt. They were the targets. The heroes had called this man and his seven monsters. But the heroes were weak and blind. The ones that’d walked this street, they hadn’t seen her hurting. They only fought the villains that looked like villains, who wore it on their sleeve. There’d been a hate growing inside her for as long as she could remember, a hate so bitter and dark that she felt like she was looking in a mirror when she saw the faces of the others. They’d cultivated it by choice, and it made them stronger, while she’d let it grow without consideration. A cancer. 

Something natural, distorted to reproduce wildly. Something that would kill its host if it wasn’t addressed. It was an appropriate word, but she didn’t want to cut out her hate. She’d tasted power, and now she wanted to burn with it. Instead of answering with a word, she raised a finger and pointed it at him. Then, slowly and deliberately at the other seven behind him. 

“One of us, huh? We do happen to have an empty spot in the family, if you so happen to want it.”

She nodded. 

Families were things made of darkness and violence to her. It was only natural that Bonesaw take their offered hand. Only natural for her to follow the strangers who had saved her with destruction into the most unholy of nights, Jack Slash on one side and the Siberian on the other.


	3. William

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Cannibalism, unethical science, ambigious filicide, gender talk.

“Hey, Sibby,” Bonesaw said, leaning her head against her shoulder. She would’ve thought that the Siberian would be a terrible hugger, considering how firm she was in the face of violence, but her body relaxed, perhaps artificially, against the pressure. She was always just the right temperature and her hair, so firm, wrapped over Bonesaw like a blanket. “You ever think about gender?” 

She didn’t really expect an answer, and, if she had, she would’ve expected a no. To her surprise, the Siberian nodded. 

To outside observers, she was a silent monster. Nothing more than an inexplicable force of nature that teared through legions of soldiers, capes, and civilians without prejudice. But over the two years she’d been with the Nine so far, Bonesaw had gotten good at reading her various moods. The slow nod she gave was solum— gender was something she’d given a lot of thought to. It was integral, even, to her identity. 

The Siberian examined Bonesaw, glowing gold eyes focusing on her long blonde hair and pale blue dress. Bonesaw had been aiming for an ironic sort of Alice in Wonderland aesthetic, extreme presentation as a young girl in contrast with her true nature, but it was getting old. The outfit was starting to be more a reminder of her past than a celebration of her present. 

“Maybe I should just go naked like you, huh,” she mused. The Siberian’s body shook in a way that was almost a laugh. “You’re right. Where would I carry my tools? I guess I could work them into my body, but there’s only so much space, and I’d be treading on Mannequin’s aesthetic.”

She curled her body around her and held up Bonesaw’s hair to braid it. The toxins she dyed her hair with wouldn’t do anything to the Siberian, but it still made Bonesaw take a quick breath. She examined that feeling for a moment and realized it wasn’t concern, either for her hair’s safety or for the Siberian’s. It was an acknowledgement that she didn’t want it long anymore. She wasn’t a kid. She’d turned eleven just the last week, the same age that Jack was when he’d turned the Nine from King’s little cult of killers into a real family. 

“Cut it off?” she asked. The Siberian looked at her again, her shoulders raised in a question. Bonesaw nodded confirmation. She could do it herself, she supposed, but she was so used to being the one modifying her body. It wouldn’t feel like a real change if she wasn’t in anyway surrendering control. As the Siberian sliced her sharp fingernails across Bonesaw’s ringlets, she made a series of gestures that Bonesaw took to be referring to her own thoughts on gender. If she understood right… 

“You weren’t always a woman?” 

She nodded. 

“But you are now.” 

She shrugged. Not quite a woman. Bonesaw thought they understood. Just as girlhood had connotations of small and cute and _vulnerable_ , womanhood was restrained. It was defined by its relationship to masculinity and humanity as a whole, both things the Siberian cared nothing for.

“A she-wolf,” Bonesaw suggested, and the Siberian tilted her head to think as she carefully trimmed the bangs. She nodded. “All the dresses and stuff is acting. Not that I don’t like acting— I’m good at it and the effect it has on the audience, well, we all love that. But it’s Jack that’s the performer. He’s the director. I think I’d rather design the set, you know?” 

The Siberian looked at her handiwork. Bonesaw pulled a tool with a blade outside of their belt and used its shiny side as a mirror. They nodded. It looked good. 

“Who are you in that metaphor, anyway? Exit stage left pursued by bear?” 

The Siberian smiled proudly, teeth barred, and licked Bonesaw’s cheek. Bonesaw grinned and wiped the saliva off. The mechanics of how a projection could possibly salivate were fascinating and something they wanted to explore, but the Siberian preferred to maintain a distance between the rest of the Nine and her body. Aside from the occasional checkup, Bonesaw was hands off with it and studying the projected form was basically impossible, since their tools couldn’t cut past the skin. Their curiosity was an itch they scratched in other ways.

An itch they’d scratch now, they decided, as they experimented with a new gender presentation on some of the stragglers from the latest town. They got up from their seat on the pile of corpses the Siberian had collected, and dusted off their skirt. That needed to go and so did the soft curves of their chubby preadolescent feminine body.

The Siberian cocked her head in a question and a request. 

“I’ll be a few hours. I wanna test my ideas on the locals first, get an outside perspective on how it’ll look before I start on myself. Go chase the stragglers, if the others haven’t caught them yet.“ 

She raised an eyebrow in concern. 

“I’ll be fine. Jack said the capes from the nearby cities will take ages to mobilize, if they come at all. Nice Guy is probably around and Screamer will be back in twenty two minutes, if my timing is right.” The Siberian rolled her eyes just as Bonesaw added, “and it always is. Oh wow, I _am_ getting predictable.”

The Siberian lurched to her feet, head leaning forward and arms outstretched. Not quite on all fours, but not quite standing up right. She patted Bonesaw on the head, her invincibility transferring with each touch so the blow wouldn’t shatter their skull. Her golden eyes were filled with love and pride. 

It had taken the death of her daughter and the song of the Simurgh to force her to stop repressing her increasingly insistent thoughts about gender identity. It had taken one of the Doctor’s vials to force her to transition publicly, and it had taken so much violence to force the world and the woman she hungered for to see her as what she was. Bonesaw had just considered gender in their tinker-y way and understood it. 

The Siberian thought about what the Simurgh had showed her sometimes. The eerie melody from the ghostly orchestra almost too far away for her to make out any lyrics but undeniably recognizable still haunted her on occasion, driving her forward. Everyone heard it differently, or so they said on the message boards where people admitted they’d gotten caught in her spell. Some called it a high pitched scream of pain from someone they swore they’d just about recognized every time their attention drifted, others, it was a mechanical click that was one inconsistency shy of a pattern. 

Alexandria took a particular interest in mapping the descriptions, and the Siberian knew, with the same bone deep certainty that she knew her desires, that not knowing her closest enemy and oldest lover’s experience with the angel itched at her. Scratched at her, digging deep into her skull, like her fingers had in that first glorious fight. 

She didn’t know the exact point she'd fallen. The visions that swum before her eyes seemed so mundane, nothing like the violent scenes of death she’d imagined from the descriptions of the first attack. Her, watching her daughter running off with friends, laughing so easily, belonging, so easily, to a group of other girls. 

Sure, she’d felt a twinge of jealousy that the song dragged to the surface and magnified, but it wasn’t going to turn her into a crazed killing machine. Neither was the time her daughter sobbed because a boy pulled her hair in school, and she’d replied with ‘boys will be boys,’ with the unspoken ‘forever’ at the end of it. Or had it been, ‘that means he likes you?’ Her daughter asked why, said she wasn’t like that, and she didn’t have an answer. 

She remembered a fight they’d had, though that memory hadn’t been forced before her eyes. How her daughter accused her of trying to live her life vicariously. That she must’ve made some sort of terrible mistake when she was younger and she thought by controlling her daughter’s choices, she could avoid it the second time around. 

The only words in her defense she could offer were that hadn’t made any choices to regret. Even working for Cauldron, something she’d always loved with the secret thrill of knowing something only a select few others did, wasn’t really a choice. 

Had the Siberian known that the vial she’d given her daughter would kill her? Had she known the vial she’d taken would change her? 

She’d watched her daughter crumble beneath the weight of the transformation, flesh melting first into a shape she couldn’t control and the. Into nothing at all, screaming in pain, and all she’d thought was, that’s it. Those were the lyrics to the haunting melody. Then she’d collapsed into her own change, waking cradling her own body in her arms. All that was left of her daughter was the scent of burnt flesh, something she’d grown infinitely familiar with since.

Had she wanted her daughter to die, or, better yet, be transformed into something she saw as truly her own creation? 

Her first encounter with the world in her truest glory left her closest friend dead and her lover maimed. It’d tasted glorious, and she wanted more, more, more. And she took it, with no reservations. 

In retrospect, she didn’t know if she would’ve changed any of her decisions. As much it dug at her to know most of the Cauldron elite probably still thought of her by her deadname, she still loved seeing the aftermath of her work there. The rush of cutting down and biting into the flesh of a monstrous cape never got old, especially with their diversity. 

Each prey came with a special sort of challenge and hers were the best. Each second they survived past their natural death was a rush of pride. They didn’t know she was responsible for their life just as she was her responsible for their death, but they didn’t need to. She liked to think sometimes there was a little flash of recognition, traces of memories not completely stolen by another of the Doctor’s trained beasts, as she took them to pieces. 

She wouldn’t go back to being the Doctor’s dog, her pet scientist. She’d always been the only one in the room who’d ever actually gotten a doctorate.

Not that she used it that much these days. She smirked at that thought as she prowled away from Bonesaw. That kid was going places. Their art could compete with the most extreme deviations in terms of pure fucked upness, and they fit right in with her pack. Not everyone did. Jack Slash and Shatterbird made most of the recruiting choices, but she’d found Bonesaw herself. She’d noticed the way the darkness hung over them, how they kept holding themself back when they wanted to bite because they were scared, and she’d given them a chance to tear off their collar. They had, and now they were stripping away another set of chains without any prompting at all. She couldn’t be happier for her pup.

She looked up towards the sun and howled with joy and pride and in declaration of a new hunt. Her rough voice, barely used, was a sound in the uncanny luminal space between human and monstrous that sent a shiver through the bones of all those still alive in this small town. 

The Siberian was her own masterpiece, all edges and teeth and warm blood on her tongue. She wasn’t anything like Jack Slash with his games and his riddles and his grand designs for humanity, all ripple effects and butterflies. She knew how this world ended, and it wasn’t with the wrong flap of an innocent wing. It was in fire and fury and the heat of a golden glow.She pressed her head against the ground and listened to the foot falls, adjusted her direction, and clambered at a leisurely pace towards a small group. There was no hurry. All prey fell to her in the end.


	4. Vasil

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Dismissive mentions of suicide and implied discussion of Heartbreaker.

The Slaughterhouse Nine was exactly like the Vasil family. The Slaughterhouse Nine was nothing like the Vasil Family. 

The similarities were obvious enough. The trail of forlorn souls, albeit maimed and murdered rather than heartbroken and brainwashed. The constant need to do something, to be somebody special, or else fade into the background. The drive for the next spectacle to be bigger, better. It was the differences that were shocking. In her wildest fantasies, she’d imagined doing something badass to earn her spot on the crew. Maybe offing someone like Hatchet Face, the cape killer, and proving she could be just as tough as them.

Instead, they’d found her crying to some sappy music in a gift shop off the highway, clutching onto a cheap sweat shirt. She hadn’t even killed anyone that day, not on purpose. (It wasn’t her fault a whole bunch of someones had offed themselves because she’d been giving out a low level despair aura. She’d been in a shit mood. They didn’t deserve to be happy.)

They’d killed dear old dad as a gift. Jack had called it a welcome home present, one of many. Bonesaw’s was a hug and a hand to hold for as long as she needed one. The Siberian’s was also touch, but of a different sort. She’d let Cherie on her back as she’d run for hours. Cherie had screamed with cathartic rage and joy, while anyone they came across did so in fear. They’d even slain heroes they’d come across. She wouldn’t have expected Mannequin, or Sphere as his old (and objectively terrible) name went, to be good at cooking, but he made a mean grilled cheese. Burnscar and Shatterbird had good taste in books, and even if Crawler’s came with the condition that she do her best to beat the shit out of him, he made one hell of a cushion. Cherie’s old plans about making them love her now seemed ridiculous. In the light of everything they’d done, it didn’t seem like she even needed to use her power to get love. 

That was a realization that’d made her cry like a dumbass little baby exposed to the harshness of the world for the first time. If anyone had told the S-Class obsessed preteen Cherie that Bonesaw’s biotinkerering extended to being one hell of a therapist, she’d have laughed in their face and then made them hurt for fucking with her. But they were, and despite her tears, that night was one of her happiest memories.

She’d tried her plan anyway, and it was that night, the night before they entered Brockton Bay, that she admitted it to the younger girl. Or monster, as they preferred to be called. 

The two of them stood in the hallway outside the hotel suite the team had taken for their own. Crawler lurked on the rooftop to keep his hundreds of eyes out for attackers, even though Cherish told him she could hear them coming from much farther, Shatterbird was examining the swimming pool and keeping the staff up way too late catering to her every whim, and Mannequin was tinkering. The rest of the team was eating room service inside. 

“I know,” Bonesaw said, and Cherie gasped. Not even at the words, though they sent a shiver down her spine. The rest of the Nine, even Crawler, just— stopped. It was like they’d all died at once. Very few people died instantly, in her experience, and even less when the case of death was the Slaughterhouse Nine, but it happened. This felt like that to her strange senses. Completely muted. She could see Bonesaw standing there. Breathing. 

“We had precautions in place before we ever went to Montreal, Cherish. I’ve been doing this a long time and Jack’s been doing it even longer.”

She felt shame twist violently. 

“What will you do?” 

Bonesaw shrugged. 

“Depends. What will you do?” 

Cherie couldn’t read facial expressions or body languages. Without the thrum of their music in her ears, she was useless. She’d been so reliant on that sense for so long. It could’ve been a threat. It could’ve been anything. 

“I—“

“Oh, right.” The sounds flooded right back, and Cherie was dumbfounded for the second time. Bonesaw was still affable. Still warm to her. Were those really the beats of love? Her power didn’t lie to her; it never had. Then again, it’d never stopped before either. 

“Don’t you want me to go? At least hurt me a bit?” 

Bonesaw looked at her and smiled softly. Their body was covered with surgery and battle scars that they didn’t bother trying to hide. They wore their wounds with pride, and for a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine, they were. What would otherwise be a mark of shame meant they’d survived impossible odds.

Cherish traced the faint white lines across her arm, where the monster with the gentle words brought her arm back into working order mere minutes after Alexandria practically shattered it in an automatic response to an overpowering wave of guilt. She’d thought she was dead then too, even as she heard the Siberian’s thunderous arrival. These people, who she’d thought to rule, saved her unconditionally, with no expectation of reward. No negotiation, just love. It felt wrong. 

“Cherish, family isn’t meant to hurt.”


	5. Panacea

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Discussion of incest, long term effects of child abuse/neglect, mind control, and other Amy Dallon relevant subjects.

When she opened the door, she saw a stranger stitching Mark’s head closed. It took her a few seconds to process the mental image, as caught up in her own concerns as she was, and another few to recognize Bonesaw. The notorious biotinker’s dirty blonde hair tied back in a loose ponytail. They’d rolled up the sleeves of their bloodstained and dirty but otherwise plain gray hoodie. 

Amy had seen the pictures, but she still hadn’t anticipated how complete their androgyny was. There was absolutely nothing about them that signaled gender in any way. Even the shape of their body was softened at the edges and they hardened at the curves. The shoulder length hair should’ve read as feminine, but all Amy could wonder about when she saw it was if Bonesaw was hiding any weapon there. Their teeth were sharp, and Amy couldn’t help but wonder what it would feel like to touch their skin, to feel the race of all the toxins and dangers hidden beneath their skin, the bombs set to detonate when their heart stopped beating. 

They were uneven, even as they were supernaturally graceful and elegance with every pass of the needle. Their left leg was too thick and darker than their other limbs. Amy knew if they pulled up their pants, they’d see a mess of tissue from where they’d attached someone else’s body part. Mechanical spiders scurried across Mark's chest. One perched on his chest, a sharp leg pointed at his jugular. 

“Hey, Amy,” they said, casually packing up a bag of medical supplies. She recognized plenty of the tools from her visits to hospitals, though she didn’t have the names.

“What did you do?” she asked, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. Victoria had said some of the Brockton Bay Wards thought the crime scene they’d stumbled across could’ve been the Nine, but she hadn’t wanted to believe it. She couldn’t. Not here, not now, not after everything. 

“Fixed the brain damage. And the depression. Did you know he was depressed?” 

“And?” she prompted. Bonesaw shrugged.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I said that was it.” It’s a fact, not a question. They turned around and leaned against the sofa. “He’ll wake up in twenty minutes. I’ll be gone by then.” 

She reached for her phone before she realized it was gone. Bonesaw dangled it between the two of them.

“Don't bother with an airborne plague. It'd take too long for you to figure out what I've immunized myself to, and by the time you find something that works, I'll have killed your adoptive father. Besides, I just want to talk.” 

“Why should I believe you?” _Why did say adoptive?_

“You shouldn’t, and you won’t, but it's not like you've got any other options, now do you?”

“I could call for help. Brandish and Glory Girl—“

“Carol and Victoria,” they said, with an emphasis on their civilian names that might’ve meant more if they weren’t public knowledge, “are off dealing with Rachel Lint’s power grab, and they’ll be preoccupied with finding out why the Siberian is talking to her for a while yet.” 

Seeing the look of panic in Amy’ eyes at the mention of the Siberian, Bonesaw added, “they’ll be fine. Or, should I say, Victoria will be fine, since she's the one you actually give two shits about.” 

Amy felt like she’d been punched in the gut, and it took a moment for her to check that Bonesaw hadn’t actually hit her at a distance, somehow. 

"You don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

“Sure I do. You know Heartbreaker?” She nodded. The family of one of the women he’d discarded had contacted her. Begged her to fix their daughter, sister, lover. But Heartbreaker’s power affected the brain, and Amy couldn’t. She hadn’t even looked them in the eye, and the woman had killed herself a week later. “He’s dead now. Welcome gift for Cherish, the latest to the family. She thinks she’ll be the newbie forever. Who knows, maybe she'll be the second to last if you come with. Between the two of us, nobody we love will ever have to leave again.” 

Amy’s mind didn’t quite track the moment she’d realized Bonesaw was here to recruit her, but she was paid fully aware of the rush of feelings that’d followed. Fear, anger, guilt... curiosity? She wanted to see where this was going, even as she never wanted to see them again. She wanted them gone. 

“Sorry if I didn’t mention that at the top. I want you for my family, cuz god knows the one you have doesn’t.” 

“You don’t know anything about my family.”

“Do I now? I mentioned Heartbreaker, because Cherish is one of his kids. Emotionally stunted, paranoid as all hell, and fixated on sexual attraction slash worship, which in her mind are the same thing, as the only way to ever be valued. She had a crush on one of her siblings too, you know.“ 

Those feelings that Amy couldn’t begin to articulate to herself, let alone anyone else, all summed up with such a dismissive word. It tasted like rot. Then her response seemed absurd. The problem wasn’t that Bonesaw was trivializing the feelings she’d never, ever put into words, the problem was those feelings in the first place.

“I don’t—“ 

“Cherish can sense emotions, you know.”

Amy shut up. 

“Anyway, she came to us pretty fucked up. Big plans of mind control and addicting us to her or whatever.” A member of the Slaughterhouse Nine, pretty fucked up. If Amy wasn’t terrified, she might’ve laughed at the understatement. “She told me all that. And you know what? I think she’s doing a lot better. Might be getting away from the constant exposure to full frontal blasts of emotion manipulation powers. Might be hanging out with some people that care about her for her rather than what she can do. Might be both.” 

The connection hit her like a train. Bonesaw hadn’t touched Amy, but they’d cut her open anyway. 

She’d first heard of the Slaughterhouse Nine in the same breath as the Endbringers and, on some level, she hadn’t believed the comparison. She’d been to the aftermath of attacks from both groups, excepting the Simurgh, and although the survivors she’d tended to always seemed wounded in much more deliberate, personal methods when the Nine was involved, she’d attributed that to their numbers and ever changing membership. Even the Simurgh was some degree of predictable. She didn’t gain new agendas or vendettas every time the heroes won. Of course it was a shock when Shatterbird struck for the first time. Nobody had thought that the Nine would strike so preemptively. 

She hadn’t considered that the ones with the most shell shocked looks were the ones who’d talked to her, not the ones who who she'd maimed with shards of glass. It wasn’t the thoughts of Bonesaw’s previous projects, the idea that they could’ve implanted some mechanical virus into Mark’s brain that’d turn him into an unrecognizable monster. It was the hope. She'd never even thought about Victoria's aura. She'd never even questioned it. 

“Of course, when she asked, I checked, and it turns out her crush was perfectly natural all along. Maybe helped along by the circumstances, in the same way an abusive parent helps along any kid’s fucked up wants.“

Their eyes were as sharp as anything Flechette had touched. They could pierce skin, bone, and Endbringer flesh alike.

“I don’t think...” she tried to say, but she didn’t know how to finish her sentence.

“You don’t have to make up your mind right now. We’ll be in town for a bit. Just consider it. In the end, we all made our choices. I know I did. If it wasn’t for Jack Slash and the Siberian, well. I can’t imagine I’d be very happy.”

And they just left, their ponytail swinging. Beneath their undercut, at the top of their neck, Amy noticed a line of animated circular tattoos that went down their back. The one at the top was a wave of gray gradients that moved violently in random directions, seeming to slam against the walls of their skin before they clicked back into place at a regular rate. The next one almost looked like a snow globe, except instead of some cute decoration in the center, there were guns and realistic hearts that beat too slowly. She couldn’t see any further down, but she guessed there were seven. One in between each of their cervical vertebrae, for each member of the Nine that they’d seen die. Ending with Hatchet Face, their most recent loss.

She could imagine Bonesaw grieving, carving the pain into their own body in an effort to memorialize their loss. This city was a grave, and she’d seen more than her fair share of mourners from such a young age. She’d long since stopped listening to the families of those she’d saved, stopped giving a shit when before reality had sharpened in agonizing detail every time she’d been too slow, every time she was one room down, helping someone whose cancer would kill them in a year when there was someone bleeding to death now. But this? This was what rugged on her heart strings?

She felt sick. Sick with herself. Sick of herself. Sick to her stomach. 

She was a monster, constrained only by her own rules. She could be as bad as Tattletale. As bad as Bonesaw. As bad as her _real_ father. 

-

Amy left the city with nothing more than a backpack, a fistful of cash, and a messy haircut. Carol and Victoria were still responding to whatever the Siberian and Hellhound had done, if Bonesaw was to be believed. By the time they reached the apartment, they found a panicked Mark and two notes, written in her nervous scrawl. One in Victoria’s room and one in her adoptive parent’s. 

The first one read: I’m sorry.

The second one was at the bottom of several scribbled out attempts at longer messages read: Cutting ties.


	6. Pet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a bit of an experiment. It was fun writing it, but I don't think I'll do it again.

Dinah’s questions for that day went something like this:

“Odds of trouble in the next hour.”

“65.6—“

“Odds of trouble before lunch time.”

“97.42–“

The numbers changed.

“Odds I survive trouble relating to Crawler.”

“4.7-“

“Odds that some or all of the Travelers survive, not including Noelle.”

“76-“

“Odds that Noelle survives the encounter with Crawler.”

“93.1-“

“Odds that you survive the encounter with Crawler.”

“87.6-“

_Odds I go home after the encounter with Crawler._

_79.218888842%._

“Odds Mr. Pitter survives the encounter with Crawler.”

“12.6554-“

He hit things, but he didn’t hit her. Even if he wanted to. The odds were always good that he wanted to, and when they got the highest, the numbers changed. 

“Odds—“ 

“Candy?” 

He demanded to know the route that would let him live, and, knowing the pain it would leave her in, Dinah lied. She looked for the path that would lead her home, knowing with one hundred percent certainty that he would die. She knew it with the same certainty that someone holding a gun to his head and pulling the trigger would. She knew it, and she didn't care. 

And the numbers changed again. 

Those numbers resolved into facts something like this: 

She delayed. She bargained for candy. She killed time. 

Crawler killed the soldiers. 

Trickster went to fight to protect Noelle. He bled out slowly. There were timelines when he survived, and if Dinah hadn’t been wracked with the excruciating pain of headaches not dulled by the candy, she would’ve cried. 

Oliver died trying to take cover. Crawler didn’t even notice the other Traveller, didn’t even process his slight powers when he crushed his head against the wall with his tail. 

Ballistic fled, but not before his arm was torn badly. He encountered a girl he thought he recognized from somewhere who stopped the bleeding. He asked where she was going. She asked him the same question. Neither of them knew with any more detail than away from here and away from the people they’d stayed with out of familiarity, rather than affection. 

Sundancer fought, hurt him in a way he hadn’t been hurt before, and burned through the doors to Noelle’s vault when he healed. It was a last resort measure. 

Genesis evacuated the injured but couldn’t return for Dinah once Noelle had been unleashed. Sundancer and her cried together. They believed all the evil they’d done meaningless, all the people they’d killed, was for nothing. They thought this was the Simurgh’s trap. They didn’t know Dinah had steered events this way, and even if they did, who knew if she was strong enough to confuse the Endbringer?

It took Crawler’s offer of Bonesaw to draw Noelle into a full on battle, but when the dust had settled, Coil was dead, Crawler was one degree stronger, Noelle was fully human again, and Dinah… Dinah was free. 

Sundancer and Genesis ventured into the ruins of Coil’s base to search for survivors, once they saw Bonesaw riding on Crawler’s back. The two cut a striking silhouette against the early morning horizon, and their exit was heralded by a chorus of screams. Dinah didn’t see or hear that, though, because she was curled into a ball in the midst of the corpses, moaning. 

Noelle and Marissa embraced while Genesis’s form hovered above them, a silent guardian. They found Dinah curled up in the rubble, sobbing and clutching at her skull. Noelle, who retained some portion of her inhuman strength, carried her out of their prison, towards where Jess’s body slumbered, in a nearby building. 

All these sins, all the blood on their hands. It had all been for her. Now she was free. 

Had it been worth it?


	7. Hellhound

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Tattletale typical content.

“So we have some good news, some bad news, some weird news, and some batshit insane news,” Tattletale declared with a grin. Several chair sat empty, and one was pushed out of the way to make room for Genesis. The Undersiders remaining Travelers, including an exhausted Noelle, sat around the wooden table in Skitter’s base. The looked at each other for a moment, like they expected something. 

“For example. Good news: Noelle is human again. Bad news: Bonesaw did it. Weird news: She did it because Crawler asked, and I’m pretty sure there aren’t even any negative side effects. Bat shit insane news: The Travelers are illegal immigrants from Earth Aleph. Questions?”

“Several,” Grue said. Bugs scattered across the room stopped, going taught with foreign tension. Regent and Imp shared a bag of chips, and the sound of their loud chewing made everyone else in the room uncomfortable. 

“Tattletale’s lost it,” Imp replied, cheerfully. “The stress has got to her!“ 

“No, it’s true,” Noelle said. Each word was a surprise to her. Her tone was even. She stayed the same at the end of the sentence to the start of the next one. Sundancer and Genesis held her hand tight, and the simple joys of touch without complication left her head spinning. “I‘m as human as any cape. I don’t know how much that is, but it’s more than...” 

"Can we go back to the 'again' bit?" Regent asked. "Because that sounded important." 

“She was turning into something like an Endbringer,” Tattletale explained. “Still not sure why or how.” 

“Damn,” Regent said, whistling. She felt strange to his power, but it was a familiar sort of weird. Closer to Newter and Gregor the Snail than Leviathan. The presence behind the vault doors had been way more alien. “Would’ve wanted to see that. Even the Slaughterhouse Nine would be too scared to fuck with us.” 

He didn't add the bit about showing up his sister, but Tattletale read it in how he cut off his words too quickly, in how he reached too quickly for the chips, and in how his next handful was ever so slightly too much for his mouth. She'd been genuinely happy when she'd showed up at his door, in her special fucked up way, and she'd thanked him so sincerely, while she'd talked about all the ways the Nine was going to kill him. 

“I wasn’t emotionally stable. I’m still not. I’m a lot better, but… Only a few hours ago, I’d be more likely to kill you than them.” 

“Oh well,” he said, talking while chewing with his mouth open. "Are you going to elaborate on the Aleph thing or?" 

“We’ve never told anyone all this,” Sundancer said. She folded in on herself, shoulders forward, and stumbled over the words. “Tattletale only knows bits and pieces. We have a lot of questions about how we got here. I'm not sure I feel comfortable telling the story. Trickster always did the negotiating with other villains. Crawler killed him, we couldn’t find Oliver, and Ballistic is gone.” 

“Gone?” Skitter asked. She’d stayed quiet so far, seemingly lost in thought. The bugs fidgeted for her, leaving her normally busy fingers still. Bitch wasn’t in the room. She’d said she’d keep watch outside, though the bugs had Skitter planted on her indicated she wasn't exactly doing the rounds. Tattletale harbored concerns over what her distance signaled, but for now, she appreciated not needing to calculate for yet another turbulent personality.

“Word on the street is Panacea ran away. Dinah’s power is busted, but I’d bet the odds the two found each other are high,” Tattletale mused. “Beyond that? Time will tell, but he's probably” 

“We brought Dinah home. If you’re going to try to use her like Coil did,” Sundancer bristled and, as if in response to _her_ emotions, the bugs in the room tensed, “I’ll stop you.”

“That she’s home safe is part of the good news,” Tattletale rolled her eyes. “Jesus, you think I wanted that whole situation? Her family is leaving for a nice long vacation, paid for by yours truly, and I’ve already put a nice chunk of our payout from the bank job into her college fund. I’m not a monster.” Sundancer and Skitter defused, though they stayed on high alert. 

“And Coil is fine with this?” Grue asked, concerned. 

“Coil is dead,” Tattletale sighed and rested her head in her elbows. She sat at the head of the table, a position that set her apart from her friends and allies. Noelle was at the other end. “He wasn’t working on finding you a tinker to get you home. Fixing Noelle, yes, because she was dangerous. But home was always going to be ‘out of his price range’ unless you did ‘one more job.’ I won’t do that. I have a couple of ideas I want to explore, but I can’t give you an instant or guaranteed fix, and I can’t work on those ideas with the Slaughterhouse Nine in town.” 

“Do you want us to fight them?” Sundancer asked. 

“I won’t hold my help hostage. Inter-dimensional travel was on my mind anyway, because of Dinah’s prophecy. I can say your help could be the difference between my life and death, which is true. I’ve already started draining Coil’s accounts, so I can pay you. But your friends are dead, and Noelle‘s just been given a second lease on life from the least trustworthy biotinker I know of because a masochistic reptile asked them to. You might have some shit to take care of.” 

Noelle scratched at her legs, self conscious of her body. She hadn’t eaten in the hours it’d taken to wrangle the Undersiders and Travelers, and she wasn’t starving. There wasn’t that uncontrollable hunger. She knew she should be weak from months of inactivity and sun deprivation, and, to an extent, she was. She'd spent most of the ride to Skitter's base half asleep, arms wrapped tight around Sundancer. 

“What’s your point?” Sundancer asked, tired. 

“It doesn’t take a genius to see the Travelers had an unhealthy dynamic. Trickster, god bless his soul, either stopped or never gave a shit about anyone but Noelle. Ballistic was coping with the situation by being pissed at him and ignoring the rest of you. Genesis hasn’t been conscious enough to process her feelings on pretty much anything, and Sundancer, you’re carrying around more than enough guilt for the rest of the team combined. Yes, you’re a murderer. So is Regent, and so’s Bitch, depending on how you look at it. You’re not special. It’s not disrespecting their memory to stop obsessing over it.”

Sundancer loosened her grip on Noelle’s hand. Her eyes welled up with tears. 

“Tattletale,” Grue warned. Imp and Regent continued eating their chips. Skitter looked nonplused, but Tattletale’s peripheral vision captured the movement of the bugs. Each of the dozen tiny specks that nobody else could’ve possibly hoped to process as a whole, split up and left on hair or fabric, unconciously contributed to her understanding of Skitter’s thought process. She wasn't okay. 

“Shush, I’m going somewhere with this,” she said, still smiling. 

“What’s your point?” Noelle asked. In that moment, she didn’t look like a tired teenaged girl who’d lived in terror of murdering everyone she loved for over a year. She looked like a leader. 

“My point is that I sincerely believe that, despite Coil’s underhanded tactics, every Undersider has had a healthier support system since joining the group. We’ve discussed every job we’ve pulled and share the rewards equitably. And this _was_ despite Coil’s influence. When we weren’t given a voice in the discussion about how we would handle Empire Eighty Eight, I was misrepresented, our reputation was irreparably damaged, and Grue nearly died.” 

“Hey,” he said. 

“When we weren’t informed about Dinah, we were all caught off guard, and Skitter was isolated because she stood up to him, right when Leviathan attacked. I didn’t figure out what Armsmaster was up until too late, and it was pure luck she was merely maimed badly enough she needed Panacea’s assistance to ever walk again. Two of Bitch’s oldest dogs were killed, along with several younger rescues. We’re still recovering from how badly he fucked us with that. Our collaborations with you have been tentative and our interactions are forced or unintuitive. We don’t know each other and we don’t trust each other. What I’m proposing is that we completely merge our teams or the three of you leave the city.” 

“And you’ll help us get home either way?” Noelle asked. 

“Noelle,” Sundancer began.

“I just want to clarify.” 

“Yes, I will. In the former situation, I will make it one of my highest priorities, alongside protecting the workers of the city as we get things back into order for Skitter and fighting animal abuse for Bitch. I suspect I could work something out within months, assuming we could drive the Slaughterhouse Nine away. You’d each have equal say in deciding our specific missions and broader goals. Those of us with secret identities would reveal them. In the latter, we would maintain a strictly professional relationship, and assistance on any other matter would require compensation. You wouldn’t have any recompense if we did anything you viewed as morally wrong or plain dumb, but you wouldn’t have any obligations.” Noelle nodded. “And she’s right to ask about details, Sundancer. I’m not offended she doesn’t trust me. She’s in good company on that front.” She gestured towards the still healing bruises from the hospital incident. 

“We had a bet going on how long it’d take her to piss off one of the big guns,” Regent said. “I’m pretty sure I get double pay out, because she got Legend’s goat. The guy’s supposed to be unflappable.” 

“By which he means, he said, ‘hey, Grue, bet you twenty bucks some out-of-towner tries to murder Tattletale,’ and Grue grunted in response. And technically, Miss Militia was the only one who actually put a gun to my head,” Tattletale corrected. “I suppose you could describe Leviathan as an out-of-towner, as he did nearly drown me.”

Imp’s eyes were wide open in awe at the conversation as she reached for the last chip. Her hand brushed against Regent’s as he did the same and 

— 

What was Regent doing again?

“Imp, stop using your power for snacks,” Tattletale said, exasperated. “Regent, shut up, please.”

“Tattletale, thinking someone is talking too much? This is totally not majorly out of character. Wait, who?”

“Imp,” Tattletale repeated, glaring in the approximate direction of where the teammate should've been.

\-- 

Imp smirked before she slapped herself in the face. Skitter shook her head, and Grue put his face in his hands, muttering something about professionalism. All the while, Tattletale kept smiling. 

Sundancer shrunk in on herself, while Noelle was trying to hold back her own smile. Genesis looked at the ground. The three of them couldn’t remember going a conversation without Ballistic and Trickster getting into a pointless argument. Genesis hadn’t laughed at anything her once friends had said in so long. The threat of the Simurgh’s plot and Noelle’s situation had weighed so heavily on her that she’d hardly thought about anything else. 

“I’ve liked Brockton Bay,” Sundancer admitted. “It’s badly damaged, but it’s the first place we’ve stayed for months instead of weeks or days. It kinda reminds me of those early days, back in Madison. Things were bad, but we had superpowers, y’know? I guess that stopped being awesome pretty quickly, but…” 

Genesis nodded. Noelle looked at both of them. She wasn’t anywhere near as strong as she had been merely hours ago, but whatever Bonesaw had done hadn’t completely separated her from her powers. She’d just limited them and transformed them into something safer. Something she could use without fear of hurting her friends or strangers. 

“I think we’re in,” she decided. “On the condition that we don’t name the new team with a portmanteau. Travelsiders is terrible and Undervers is even worse.” 

Sundancer chuckled, and she remembered an old day at their high school’s computer lab. The sun shone through an open window, light refracting on Noelle, laughing wildly with her head thrown back at a joke Jess made. She was always so self conscious about her loud laugh, but every now and then, one of them got through to her. A few moments later, she’d clamped her mouth shut as Krause came in with some rude comment she’d politely smiled at, but for those brief seconds, she’d let her walls down. She was so beautiful then, and she was beautiful now, wicked intelligence shining in the curve of her lips. 

“My name is Marissa Newland,” Sundancer said, pulling off her visor and letting her hair spill down her mask. She was beautiful, even as her colors were faded. Once upon a time, she wore makeup everyday. Not excessively and not out of vanity-- it'd been a hobby. There was an art to the perfectly sharp eyeliner, a craft to matching colors of making to her warm skin. She still brushed her hair everyday but to the point of obsession, staring into the mirror and crying as she did it. Her smile now didn't seem to match the scar across her throat or the chunk of flesh missing from her ear. 

“Lisa Wilbourne.” There was something different in her smile this time. Something kinder. She pulled a hair tie out of her pocket and tugged her hair back into a tight pony tail. She pealed off the domino mask, exposing her gentle freckles, and she adopted a different posture, perhaps unconsciously.

—

“Bitch!” Lisa called out. She hadn’t taken the news about the merger particularly well, which Lisa had anticipated. She’d hoped to be able to mitigate the issue with a good delivery, but she'd never been particularly good at delicacy. Besides, Bitch would make a Harvard trained diplomat tear their hair out. “Wait up.” 

“No,” Bitch said. “No, I’m not going to listen to any more of your fucking words.”

“I know what happened. I know the Siberian approached you.” 

“I don’t care,” she snarled and kept walking. “I don’t fucking care.” 

“She’s acting. I’ve watched the footage, and she’s more than a feral killer. Whatever she said, it was a manipulation. She’s smart.” 

Lisa knew she’d pushed too far when Bitch whirled on her heels. The angered momentum that’d been carrying her away from the team was now aimed at making Lisa shut up. 

“Unlike me?” Bitch retorted. 

Lisa stopped walking too and looked her right in the eyes. Challenging her. She knew that with Coil dead, Brian, Noelle, and Taylor would be preoccupied with reevaluating their word views and positions for a while yet. Alec had no interest in leadership, and if Imp did, she was too new. Noelle or Taylor would probably end up as battlefield commander, and Brian would retake his role in negotiating with other capes. But for now, Lisa would handle the necessary work, and that included convincing Bitch to play along.

It was a bad sign when Bitch didn’t look away from the eye contact. It was a worse sign when the sound rose up from her chest, and she closed in on Lisa. Maybe it was Lisa’s power that let her remain unflinching as people put guns to her head or choked her out or slapped her. Maybe she was just like this. Either way, she didn’t cry out, even as Bitch punched her. 

Her power informed her she’d broken her nose before she felt the pain. She stumbled back, from the force alone and put a hand against a wall to stabilize herself.

“Fuck you,” Bitch said, emphasizing each word. “You. Don’t. Know. Me.” 

“Neither does she,” she got out before Bitch hit her again. This time, she couldn’t keep herself from letting out a small grunt and looking down. Even without ordering the three dogs behind her to attack, Bitch could do an impressive amount of damage. Where Lisa had spent her years on the streets scamming idiots, ducking confrontation, and taking the hits when she had too, Bitch had fought and not always with her power. 

“Okay, okay,” Imp said, suddenly having been there all along. “I’m here for beating on Tattletale as much as, apparently, the next human being on this planet, but holy shit, Bitch, she didn’t even go all info-dumpy on you like she did the Ex-Travelers, current Brockton Bi-grade.” 

“That name sucks,” Lisa said. Her voice sounded wrong. No concussion... her teeth? She tasted blood and pressed her tongue against a gap. _Shit._

“Shut up,” Bitch said, and she pulled back to hit Lisa again. Bugs swarmed from the cracks between the streets to form a roughly humanoid shell. “Imp, Skitter,” Lisa forced the words out, even as the lisp made the name sound more like _Thkitter_ , “back off.” The bugs scurried away, after a pause. Lisa wondered who the other person she’d named was, then let her power filled in the gaps. _Right._

The lisp would seriously undermine her. Her voice was her only weapon. Her half assed plan to annoy the Nine into restricting themselves for the sake of a better ‘show’ would struggle if she couldn’t make herself heard. That was, if Bitch didn’t just kill her now. 

“Go to hell, Tattletale,” Bitch said, after some deliberation. She spun on her heels to leave, muttering something about dogs and wolves. She whistled for her dogs to follow her, and once she was a few blocks away, she would grow them to ride away to the Slaughterhouse Nine. Lisa had signed the death warrant for the hundreds, if not thousands or hundred of thousands, people that she would kill. 

Imp re-emerged and offered a hand to Lisa, who didn’t take it. Instead, she slid all the way to the ground and sat, thinking. She tried different organizations of facts, trying to find an outcome that didn’t tell her she’d practically authorized Rachel’s kill order already.


	8. Ashlet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ward spoilers here, for the Eclipse arc. Not too many, though, and you probably don't need to have read up till that point to get it.

“Hello, Accord,” Damsel of Distress said. Their arms were uncannily long, not visibly prosthetics until someone saw the messy scars just beneath their elbows. Living tattoos swirled around their neck. Their long white hair flowed across their back, held up partially by a waterfall braid, properly brushed for the first time in far too long thanks to the Siberian, whose eerily cold hands had swept the tangles away with a practiced ease while Bonesaw sat by and gave suggestions on style. They wore a crown of black roses stitched delicately between the twists and curls. The dress was simple and comfortable, with delicate lace embroidery at the hem they never would’ve bothered wasting their time trying to maintain before the Slaughterhouse Nine arrived at their doorstop, offering gifts for fellow royalty. “Do you remember me?” 

Not a subordinate, an equal. Perhaps even a superior, in time. Jack Slash’s challenge to make something memorable here drove them forward. The city they’d once associated with nothing but loss would be their baptism in blood, reborn once as a failed killer and now, again, as one of the best. The man they’d once despised so much stood so short before them, their steel toed boots imposing in contrast to his dress shoes. 

They’d grown since their last trip to Boston, and he hadn’t. His mask looked so complicated, and he would’ve seemed put together if he wasn’t shaking with rage. It might’ve had something to do with the dozens of minions they’d torn their bloody path through scattered across his pristine base. Only most of them were unpowered. Their black stained lips pulled upwards into a smile. He’d dismissed them once before. He wouldn’t again. 

“Not particularly,” he said. “You must forgive my rudeness, I am working with a rather short notice. I was only informed of your team’s intentions to visit this city last morning, and I have yet to familiarize myself with your new roster.” They scowled and stepped forward, shooting their power up to push them downwards as their boots collided with the marble floor. The pressure cracked stone, and Accord visibly winced. 

“I don’t mean from the news,” they said. “Boston Games. 2007. You dismissed me as an insignificant and uneducated child.” 

He thought for a moment and flipped through a booklet on his desk. A show. 

“I see now. Of course. Damsel of Distress, was it? You have moved up in the world.” 

“More than you’d know,” they replied, a knowing smirk. The end was nigh, and they would rise from the ashes of the world like they rise from the ashes of Boston. He scowled. He liked being in control. They understood that, because they’d prioritized control once. 

“Are you here to kill me, then?” 

“Maybe. I’m considering it.” A chorus of howls resounded from outside the office, followed by desperate screams of whatever employees made it out of the way of Damsel’s initial rampage. Seemed like Bitch was equally pissed off by his too-perfect aesthetic. Accord’s mask reflected his face, which meant his face was scrunched up in disgust as he looked at the door they’d torn off its hinges. “I might just destroy this place and crush everything you’ve worked to build. Leave you crippled in the ruins, just like you did me. I don’t know if you’re _significant_ enough to kill.” 

They flexed their new hands and let their power spark as they mused. Their hair flared upwards at the pressure of some supernatural power. 

Accord tried to maintain a position of power, but he was so small in his chair, his perfect world burning around him. He lived in books and numbers and carefully laid traps, but all the subtle violence in the world couldn’t compare to the weight of the Slaughterhouse Nine’s twenty six year reign of terror. They held that legacy in every inch of their flesh, in the blood sprayed across their dress. 

They stepped forward again. The power in the building shut off, and the fire alarm started screaming. Accord flinched every time the noise repeated. This was the man who’d haunted them in their worst moments since then? This pathetic fool? 

The Siberian came through the hole where they’d blown through the door. She was stained with viscera and traced a pattern across the floor. Some sort of Greek symbol. Accord’s eyes widened when he saw it, glancing from her to Damsel. 

“Oh, greetings,” Damsel said. They put a hand on the Siberian’s neck possessively and gave her a scritch, letting her invincibility wash over them, making eye contact with Accord as they did. Standing with the world’s first monster, as an equal, she continued, “Do you want to eat him? I doubt he’d be particularly tasty; he’s a spineless coward.” 

The Siberian shook her head, her hair flapping like a mane. She was majestic. There wasn’t anything explicitly inhuman in her shape, but everything about her read as primal. Her muscles rose and fell with each slight movement, so well defined, outlined by the reaching lines of soot black across her bone white skin. When she moved, the lines twisted and folded like fractals. Their heart leaped every time they saw her, ancient instincts come alive. 

The Siberian was the hunt, and so were they, in the dress woven with their body and their crown of dark flowers.

Being with the Nine was living on the razor's edge, always the predator but always pursued. It was living with the taste of fear, of desperation, and a careless hand in their hand or on their thigh. It was the warmth of blood dripping across their lips, the perfect labyrinths to chase prey through. They took their every want and need with passion and gore, leaving behind only stories of the world's most human monsters. 

In the face of that, Accord was… nothing. 

They turned away without another word. blasted him with their power without looking at the devastation. A weight they hadn’t realized they were carrying slid off their back, and they sighed softly at the sensation of belonging.

 _You’ll never have this again_ , echoed a voice from their past. For the first time since that day, they had an answer for their ghost. _And I don’t want it anymore._

— 

“No. More,” Bonesaw said, ordering Blasto to push them heavily into Huntress’s back. The Siberian had bought them time to slip away, but she couldn’t keep fighting forever, not with Dragon’s army of suits on her ass, doing everything they could to separate her from her body. She’d given Bonesaw that look— she’d traded her life for her family’s, and she’d been so proud of them as she did.“I can’t do this anymore. I can’t keep losing people!” 

Jack Slash nodded, his hand grasped white on the bone spikes. The Siberian had been with him almost since he’d begun on this road. 

“I’m going to kill her,” Cherish hissed. “I’m going to tear her to fucking pieces.” 

Night Hag stayed silent, melting into Colbie’s armor. Her skirt flared outwards. She was the most recent of their recruits, the night before the Nine made their big entrance to Boston. She’d found some common ground with Damsel, and the two had enjoyed talking about fashion, even as they’d played at fighting each other over their similarities. She’d found the photographer annoying, with ember obsessive tendencies and nonstop babbling about Polaroids, but she assumed she would have time to get over her aversion to the obsessive creep. It was kind of disappointing she’d never get to have that chance now, just as it was disappointing that she’d already made plans to team up with Shiver. The telekinetic without a Manton limitation made for some interesting interactions. 

Night Hag was beyond disappointed by the loss of the Siberian, though. 

Bitch held Bastard tight to her chest as Skinslip did his best to patch up the lacerations on her back. They were deep, made with Armsmaster’s special knife. He’d gone on about how fucking fantastic it was, and it’d all been words. Fucking words. He’d called her by the bullshit fake name, all while asking she respect his new one. Fuck that. Fuck them all. The Siberian was the first person who’d ever really gotten her and now the heroes had stolen that away too. She’d thought her old pack would get it. 

Skitter especially. Bitch had maintained hope in the first person she'd thought she could trust, even after she'd betrayed the Undersiders. Even after Tattletale had insulted Bitch with her pathetic play for power. She'd suggested Skitter for the group once Burnscar was killed, despite everything that'd happened between them since. Skitter would’ve fit in so well with these predators; her quiet fury could've matched the Siberian's in ferocity. But even she’d turned out to just have words, words, fucking words. Rejecting her, taking the moral high ground even though she'd betrayed them first. Bitch growled. 

“We’re going to make them pay,” she swore. She was splattered with the gore of bystanders, enemies, and pack mates alike. It felt good, not to force herself to clean up. She didn’t wear a mask anymore, and, at Bonesaw’s recommendation, she’d let the Siberian cut her hair short. Her left ankle was covered in a bite mark for every dog she’d lost, similarly thanks to Bonesaw. She’d only had the reminders for a week, but she felt bare without the fresh ones for the four she’d lost in Boston. Roxy. Lucy. Bear. Dakota. Would she lose the rest as a consequence of running with this pack? 

Not if Bonesaw had anything to say about it, apparently. They’d only found time to protect Huntress, Bentley, Ink, Magic, and Twinkey so far, but those five were the least torn up from the fight. They were as durable small as they were big now, and Armsmaster’s special knife had been the only thing to penetrate the already tough armor. 

“Damsel of Distress deserved better. They all did.” There were tears in their eyes. “Let me at Blasto. Motherfucker helped Defiant kill them,” Cherish practically demanded. Even Bitch could figure out which ‘them’ she meant. She’d walked in on Damsel and Cherish making out a few hours after Damsel woke up from Bonesaw’s surgery. She’d turned around and left, shutting the door before either of them had the presence of mind to break away from each other to blast her. 

“Hurt him all you want, just don’t break him yet. I want his mind in tact. Biotinkers are so rare.” Blasto’s mouth was closed so he couldn’t scream, but Bonesaw’s controls didn’t lock his face entirely. Bitch couldn’t read his expression in any detail, but she knew it wasn’t a happy one. Jack Slash had been having a pretty shit month with Brockton Bay alone and this disaster hadn’t made it any better. 

Shatterbird had the highest record of successful recruitments, and they’d abandoned her to Regent, Cherish’s fucked up brother. Jack didn’t break his promises when he didn’t have plausible deniability about it, even if he had a bad habit of interpreting them rather… liberally. If that bastard took one step out of Brockton Bay, they’d take her back and destroy him for laying a finger on her. Crawler and Mannequin had always been distant from the family, but they’d had their own ways of showing affection. Breakfast hadn’t been the same, and Crawler could be consistently counted on to do the chores the rest of the family hated. Burnscar could cheer pretty much anyone up, and she had a creativity that few of the others could match. 

G-ddamn, he missed his original team sometimes. The Slaughterhouse Nine had never felt more like a ship of Theseus than it did now. The Siberian was the last one from that era, and even she hadn’t been there for King’s reign. He was far from tired of this life, and he knew he’d find others to fill the holes in his heart, but right now, he grieved. He’d bring the end of the world in two years. He’d been promised that much, but who would he bring it with? He looked at Bitch’s strong frame, her relentless determination and animal fury, and the similarities to his oldest friend made him ache. The world would remember her, he promised. The world would remember all of them. 

Damsel of Distress had described them as royalty among villains and that’d never felt more accurate than it did now. Heavy was the head that wore the crown and all that. There were costs to their glory. 

“So, what’s his speciality?” Skinslip asked Bonesaw, once he was done patching Bitch’s back. To Bitch, he added, “Leg, please.” 

Bitch growled, but she pulled her right leg up from Malcolm’s side. The burn from one of Dragon’s missiles hurt like hell, but Skinslip was careful not to poke it while he replaced the ruined area. 

“Cloning,” Bonesaw said. “Had this whole fancy lab, before Damsel and I fucked it up.” Jack turned his head to examine the man in a new light. 

“Cloning? You don’t think he could clone specific capes, do you?” The unspoken question dangled between them. Everyone split across the couple dozen dogs, barring Bitch, understood the subtext. 

_With him, Bonesaw could bring them back. All of them._

“They wouldn’t have the same memories. I could probably bring Bitch’s dogs back with some time and a lab, but they wouldn’t really be the same. Unless…?”   
“Unless?” Jack added, used to Bonesaw trailing off like that and aware they sometimes needed prompting to finish the thought. 

“Unless?” Skinslip added. He used to have a sister who did something similar. 

“Unless?” Cherish added, because everyone else was doing it.

Bitch didn’t say anything, too focused on the hate growing inside her. Tattletale had called Armsmaster lots of things at the hospital, and though she’d been too fucked up with grief for her dogs to pay attention to all but the most important details— Skitter, a traitor, and Taylor, a manipulator. Now she regretted not listening. If she had, she could tell her pack the story. Whatever those words had been, they’d been dangerous. Like a slap in the face. Or the snap of a dog’s neck. 

Night Hag stayed silent too, twisting the inorganic parts of Bitch's dogs into her own shapes, a nervous habit that Bitch would've hit her for if she wasn't focused on her own regret.

“You guys know about Toybox?” Bonesaw began.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll probably elaborate on some other parts of this AU in shorter works later, but basically the same general events happen, unless specifically noted otherwise, just under wildly different circumstances and with different contexts. 
> 
> Also, a couple of OCs showing up for this chapter and the next, just to fill out the roster.


	9. 9000

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Vasil-Typical perspectives on romance. 
> 
> Some spoilers for Ward, up to Heavens.

“Okay,” Bonesaw said from her position on top of Blasto. “Everyone, you’ve got two options. Well, three options but two are kind of the same thing, since—“ 

“Get to the point,” Bitch growled, sharpened canines making the words come out with a bit of an accent. Not a lisp. She sat with one leg upon a table, a dog in her lap chewing on a femur. One of the Toybox tinker’s. It’d taken all day to help Bonesaw set up the pocket dimension with all the stuff the Nine would need inside, and she was worn out in a way she hadn’t been for a while. Nobody to fight except the clock meant her anger hadn’t pushed her forward in the same way, so she’d just been working with her muscles. 

Her chair was metal and uncomfortable, as was the table, but Cherish had dragged a couch in from a refreshment area.

“You guys could take a long nap in these fancy boys for those non-nerds among us—“ they tapped one of the tubes they stood between and the echo indicated it was hollow— “or you can stay up while I do my thing. It should take a year and a half or so, but based on the little apocalyptic prophecy we got back in Bitch’s home town, I say we’ll be fully operational in two.” 

Bitch bristled at the mention of Brockton Bay, and Cherish scowled. She’d gotten captured and trapped on that boat there. By her own brother, nonetheless. It didn’t seem like Jack held a grudge, but she held herself accountable for knowledge of the Siberian’s body getting out. She’d kill Tattletale herself, if she got the chance, though she knew Skinslip was the only cape in the pocket dimension without a specific, personal reason to hate her.

“I assume you don’t want to hang around and watch me work for two years?” Bonesaw asked the rest of them, but mostly Bitch, who snorted. Cherish shrugged. Jack shook his head. 

“Not really,” Skinslip said. She wore her hair down today, with the pink wristband on her right. She wrapped her patchwork skin quilt around her shoulders, almost like a cape or blanket. There were lots of patches with ink visible, courtesy of a tattoo tinker who’d become a staple of the Toybox enclave over the past year. The affected areas had needed a bit of modification by Bonesaw to attach properly, but Skinslip felt safer with the waves of flesh around her then she had before joining the Nine. “Maybe a few months.” 

“That’s what I thought. Okay, who’s up for some cryo sleep?” Besides Jack Slash, who doesn't get a choice. He's going in the tube.” 

“What? Why me?” he protested. “I’m your boss.” 

“Jack, we’re unionized. You’re the battlefield commander and head of interpersonal issues, on account of being annoyingly good at getting us out of bullshit and also into even deeper bullshit that usually turns out to be pretty fun. And you’re the official harbinger of the apocalypse, no pun intended.” She paused and looked back at where she’d stored Harbinger’s DNA. “I’m staying home too.” 

Jack pouted. It was a funny sight, Cherish couldn’t help but think. Bonesaw had grown up quite a bit in the handful of months that she’d known them, but they were still a child. They were, what? Fourteen? Fifteen? It was moments like this that made Cherish almost miss her siblings. 

Almost. The Vasils were fucking nuts. 

“Think about it this way. If we disappear for such a long period of time, and the Nine sticks to smaller population targets with less opposition... From what we know about the prophecy, they could think you might have already set the events in motion. They’ll still come after us, but with this pocket dimension, we have a refuge to flee back to. Avoid any major engagements, and they’ll think the Slaughterhouse Nine neutered without us. And when we return in our full glory?” 

Jack started nodding his head along with their words. 

“I like it,” Cherish decided. “Only question is, who gets to battlefield command slash interpersonally issue in the mean time.” 

“Don’t look at me,” Bitch said. She hadn’t really processed much of what Bonesaw was going on about but that last bit about leadership made perfect sense. 

Skinslip shook her head. She wasn’t bad at making quick decisions on the battlefield, but the interpersonal issues of the Nine? She could barely function as a human adjacent being most days, let alone manage everyone else’s. And Jack had a tendency to make interesting wagers that she didn’t feel she had the creativity to match. Night Hag limited her body to the forest of tubes, shaking her silhouette’s head slowly. She wasn’t particularly interested in the long term pay off on the scale of years and decades like he was. The longest she’d kept one victim alive was two months, under particularly special circumstances. 

Cherish had once dreamed of ruling the Nine, but that was far before she’d met them. Before she’d started to love them. Ever since then, she’d had a much better idea of what Jack dealt with as the formal leader. Her position suited her fine. 

“We do need to recruit some more,” Bonesaw mused. “There’s a cluster cape I’ve been keeping an eye on. She’s another thinker and her power isn’t even cape specific so we can go against those bullshit human soldiers Dragon and Defiant are cooking up.”

“Wait, what?” Jack asked, bemused. Bonesaw cocked an eyebrow. “What was that about a thinker power?”

“You didn’t really think you’d managed to survive twenty six years going up against more than half the cape population of Earth Bet with just an extra long knife?” 

Jack’s shocked expression told them everything they needed to know, but he nodded slowly. 

“Okay, wow, I underestimated your ego. You’re a trump thinker with an intuitive understanding of other capes, which is how you always know when to get out of dodge. I would’ve thought Harbringer noticed, back in the early days. We’ll deal with this lil issue of yours when you wake back up, kay?”

He nodded mutely and followed Bonesaw’s careful instructions on how to get into the cryogenic tube. 

“Who gives a shit?” Bitch asked, once he was sealed away.

Night Hag snorted, her body refocusing near the other three then-girls just to see Bitch’s shoulders stiffen and Skinslip inhale. 

“He’s having an existential crisis,” Cherish proclaimed, “Guys, Jack fucking Slash is having an existential crisis. I didn’t even know he was capable of that.” 

-

“You’re asking me to give everything I’ve built and join the Slaughterhouse Nine?” March asked. “Last I heard, you lot are on the way out. Even lost your spot as S Class, without your fearless leader. No thank you. I’ve got a crew of my own.” 

March and Tori were out on a picnic, in costume. The heroes were staying away, as were the other villains. They’d taken the appearance of the Nine in their home town as an opportunity to go out, as everyone would be busy being terrified of fighting even the weakened group for seven more hours and twenty three minutes and fifty nine seconds, fifty eight... it ticked down. 

They sat beneath a large oak tree. March plucked a leaf out of mid air and tossed it into the wind again, at the right angle and at the right time. It fluttered off into the distance for sixty nine seconds. Cherish smirked, like she was in on the private joke. 

Bitch stood at a distance, holding Bastard in her hands. Ink and Magic were fully grown behind her. Skinslip sat on Magic’s back, covered from the early winter Vancouver chill with layers of flesh, and Night Hag was already sinking into the dirt. The first cape they’d recruited post-Toybox fidgeted with some Tinker tech, looking bored. Her speciality was information, codes and the whatnot. Another one of Bonesaw’s picks, since her passenger included DNA as a code. She only came with them on half their excursions, since she could help out in the lab, and she only spoke French. 

At least, that’s what Cherish translated. There were good odds she was merely fucking with the rest of them. 

Cherish was the one doing the talking. She’d even taken her earbuds out. Over the past months, she’d started developing a more coherent style than knock-off Hot Topic. It helped she’d given up on the gimmick of only wearing what she could steal. She’d cut her hair short and added a new red streak for every dead member of the Nine that she’d known personally and wore torn up flannel shirts. She was harder, more determined to see Bonesaw’s dream of the Slaughterhouse Nine reunited through. Most importantly, in Bitch’s opinion, she could function without reassurance that yes, the others did like her, for more than five fucking minutes. 

“We’re not asking you to join us,” Cherish corrected. “We’re asking you to _lead_ us.” 

March reconsidered. 

“You serious?” 

Cherish nodded. She held her hands behind her back and listened to the thrum of March’s emotions as she considered her options. The woman wasn’t convinced entirely. Beneath everything, Cherish heard the familiar rhythm of obsessive love. In a Vasil, she’d call it Heartbreaker’s influence. In a cluster cape like March, it was called kiss and kill. In addition to thinker ego… Cherish suspected March was a romantic at heart. 

“Damsel of Distress once called us royalty among villains. Let’s just say… we need a regent while our once and future king slumbers.” 

“I didn’t really believe it when people said Jack Slash was killed. Sounded a bit convenient for my taste. Do you know how cluster capes can siphon all the power away?” 

“No,” she said because that’s what March wanted to hear, though she knew Bonesaw did. The cape who Burnscar replaced was part of a cluster, apparently. He’d died before the Nine could hunt down his peers, but they apparently remembered the process. 

“You hesitated for one second and seventeen milliseconds more than necessary to process my request. Not entirely true, but... the biotinker survived as well? Lovely. Well, I’d hate to spoil the reveal for them.”

“Fucking thinkers,” Bitch muttered, and Skinslip had to agree. Cherish was bad enough, always showing up when they were in a shit mood, and the memory of Accord absurdly complicated traps that’d delayed them in Boston for long enough that Dragon and Defiant to surround them was fresh in their minds. Night Hag just bobbed in the winds. 

“Do you want to?” Tori asked, trying to be quiet. The aboriginal girl cut less of an intimidating figure than March, but that wasn’t anything to do with her power. She was shy and more than a bit traumatized. Cherish figured some time with the Nine would cure her of the former, although she doubted the experience would do anything but make the latter worse. 

“Sure. Why the fuck not. We’ve already got kill orders pending. I just want one thing.” 

“Name it,” Cherish grinned. She showed teeth. 

March grinned back, as sharp, if not sharper. _Of course,_ Cherish understood immediately, before she answered. The girl in the rabbit mask wanted her... what would a fitting word be?

“My other half,” she decided, with a cocky wink. “My… cherie.” 

-

“Alexandria is dead,” Cherish proclaimed as she pulled off a backpack Skinslip made for her, before they’d gone and gotten killed by a Dragon and Weaver combo attack a couple months back. It was the first death since she’d put March in charge, and she was still hurting over the loss. Getting Shatterbird back was a welcome relief, but grief didn’t work like a math problem. Subtract one friend, get sadness. Add a different friend, get happiness. Learn an old enemy was dead, get… something. “And nobody fucking told us.” 

She looked more like Bitch in that moment than herself. March was carrying Tori awkwardly, one arm around her shoulder. 

“Fucker,” Bonzi said, her voice still heavily accented half a year after she joined. She was picking up the actual words quick, but the accent was driving Bitch even further insane she already was. Her eyes crinkled with amusement. “Everyone should act with our convenience in mind.”

“Shut up, Bonzi,” Cherish said, without any bite behind it. She had the audacity to laugh.

Bonesaw pulled out their earbuds, shutting off the podcast they’d been listening to while they were drawing out some blue prints. Without as many people to monologue at while they worked, they’d taken to writing their notes down instead. Their memory was mostly perfect but only if they recorded their thoughts, whether that be out loud or on paper.  
The mechanical spiders scurried towards Tori, inspecting the wound. It wasn’t inflicted by a power specifically, so they didn’t give it their personal attention. 

Shatterbird trailed behind the rest, her body hung at a weird angle. Cherish recognized it as Alec’s relaxed stance. It’d been a year and a day since she’d gotten captured, and it took all of Cherish’s focus to drone out Shatterbird’s emotions. They were a deafening maelstrom, as bad as Blasto’s had been before she’d muted him with obedience repeatedly. He wasn’t entirely gone; there was still plenty for Bonesaw to work with, but his feelings were much more muted. Constant disassociation. She wouldn’t do that to Shatterbird, though. 

She could barely move under her own power. Red stood behind her, paying attention to how her blood moved in case she was about to fall. Everything she did, it was a twisted mockery of how Alec would’ve moved. When she tried to speak, all that came out was a ragged cough. 

Bastard dragged Foil in between his massive jaws, and Bitch rode on his back as he padded forward slowly. March wasn’t even looking at the prone girl she’d bargained the Nine’s next months of activity away to catch, focusing her attention on Tori. Kiss slash kill was a powerful draw, but she had all the time in the world for Foil. Tori was fragile. When she died, she’d be with Bianca and the rest of the portal cluster. Speaking of Bianca… The Simurgh’s new portal made reaching her much easier. March started making plans, ones that involved empowering one of her lover’s secondary abilities. 

“How long?” Bonesaw asked, focused on the important details. 

“Back last fall. Only a few months after we left. Some shit goes down, Tattletale opened a portal to another world, and Weaver choked Alexandria with bugs, and that’s why she’s been on our ass with Defiant and Dragon, and, also Behemoth is dead?” 

“I assumed you knew,” Red said, tugging a cut around an artery open again and draining the blood into a superdense marble. Some of the spray across her chest followed her new wound, but most of it stayed put. Not hers, then. She didn’t remember how it got on her. She hadn’t been the vanguard in any of their fights. Her thinker ability to keep track of people wasn’t as good as Cherish’s, but she usually knew when people died and the amount of foreign blood meant people had probably died. “It was all over the news.” 

“We’ve been living in a pocket dimension and murdering our way across the globe. Where would we get the news from, exactly?”

Maybe the excess blood came from when she’d used her most _special_ attack. Nobody liked drowning to death, but even less liked someone else’s blood snaking into wounds opened by someone like March or the recently freed Shatterbird. Not just a little bit, which might be survivable if the hospitals were in order. Their systems overflowed with her and their heartbeats stuttered. Had one gotten close when she’d dragged them by their veins in those minutes before they’d stopped? She luxuriated in the mental image. So many memories and sounds of those around her falling while she’d stood tall... it tasted sweet, like a sugar cube dissolving on her tongue. 

“The Siberian is going to be pissed when she gets back,” Bitch muttered. 

“Huh?” Bonesaw’s entire train of thought was derailed, and she looked away from her notes for the first time. A spider crawled up onto the desk, pulling one of Cranial’s sketchbooks and flipping to a page they’d left a post-it-mark on to remind them to cross reference it with their own notes. Her drawings were remarkably detailed and to scale, for someone who presumably hadn’t spent as much time with actual human and cape brains. “About which part?” 

“Alexandria. They were fucking. Or had been. Or would be. Who cares.”

Cherish nodded confirmation, though she would’ve used a more delicate word. Then again, neither of the bruisers were particularly delicate. Her arm ached with phantom pain, a scar from one of her first fight alongside the Nine. She’d handled herself way better in later confrontations, but she’d learned a lot then. 

Red’s eyes widened. She focused her attention on the sound of heartbeats, feeling the vibration of blood through the other’s chests. The Siberian had been her role model for a long time, before she fucked up and died. She’d felt a similar disillusionment when she’d heard Alexandria failed but knowing those two were something to each other? It had to mean something. Something good, she was sure.

Night Hag’s body emerged from behind Jack Slash’s cryogenic tube, marked with a crown symbol. She flickered into the landscape again, as she expanded further. She didn’t care for discussion of romantic relationships. Assuming whatever the deal between the two apparently-not-so-industructable women was romantic, anyway. Either way, not her particular sin. 

“Really don’t buy it that the Siberian never talked to you fuckers,” Bitch grumbled. She climbed off Bastard’s back. Her power drained slowly and much slower now that Bonesaw was done with all of her pack. “How much more time till she’s back?” 

“Should be four months, thirteen days, eleven hours, eleven minutes, and eleven seconds,” March said, grinning her crooked grin. “Assuming none of us die in the meantime. I could go through the rundown of what happens, depending on who it is and who they’re replaced with, if you want.” 

“Show off,” Tori said, between gritted teeth. The spider finished with their injury and injected a simple painkiller. She sighed with relief once it kicked in. “You don’t always need to calculate so precisely.”

“I’m holding back as is. You don’t want me to start going into nanoseconds, do you?” 

“You only stop because it takes you more time to say the words than it does for the numbers to change, and you hate being off by any amount, so matter how small.” March pushed her rabbit mask up and kissed Tori passionately. Their tongues tangled, even as Tori felt the sensation in her arm drain away. Red felt their heartbeats elevate and watched, just long enough for it to be uncomfortable. March pulled away, similarly after enough time to make the others uncomfortable but two seconds before the awkwardness became worthy of note. She slid her arm around Tori’s waist, possessively, and looked Bitch right in the eyes.

“Order Bastard to let Foil go,” she commanded. There were more direct ways, for when they were in combat, but when it came to casual moments like this, establishing dominance was more important. Bitch followed the order without hesitation.

“Wake her up,” she told Bonesaw, who nodded and the mechanical spider armed with various drugs and chemicals, as well as the sutures, crawled carefully down Tori’s arm, only gently digging into her skin, rather than tearing or slicing. It maneuvered its way across the ground, avoiding areas affected too badly by Night Hag’s form, to inject an adrenaline shot into Foil’s neck. March counted down the seconds till her Foil understood again.

“I was at the Behemoth fight,” Shatterbird said, to no one in particular, words barely getting out. “Bastard nearly— fuck— bit it. Skitter— Weaver— bug girl saved him.” 

“She saved Behemoth?” Red asked, her attention mostly on the other cluster capes, but still doing her best to keep Shatterbird from crashing, either into the ground or into an emotional meltdown that she didn’t know how to deal with. It was bizarre, seeing the legendary _Shatterbird_ reduced to this. She was supposed to be powerful. She could bring cities to their knees, kill hundreds of thousands with a single note. She was supposed to be beautiful, not this half starved wreck. Pitiable. But alive. She’d survived an Endbringer fight without her free will. 

“Regent,” Cherish clarified, stepping away from the table where she’d been unpacking her souvenirs for Bonesaw and for her own collection to talk to Shatterbird. “Weaver wasn’t there in Brockton because she’s still in recovery from what we did to her in Havana. Wanna see pics?” 

“I do,” Red said.

“You were there,” Cherish remarked. “I’m pretty sure her wounds got infected because of you, actually. Defiant was frustrated she wasn’t there. Problems with surgery.”

“I want to see again,” she said, and she felt her own heartbeat pound. She could do it purpose, push the blood through faster, but it felt fake. Her heartbeat was a symptom of her emotions, and Cherish would hear those anyway. Cherish, beautiful, survivor, Cherish. She wondered if Cherish was using her power on her, making her love her, and she thought, no, she knew she wouldn’t mind if that was the case. Red thought she’d respect Cherish even more, love her with the same dizzy that swept her whole body sideways for March and for Night Hag and for the sleeping beauty, Jack Slash. The once and future king. 

That thought connected to King and to all the other fallen Nine. They’d died and they’d failed, but they would be resurrected different. Stronger. Without the sins of their predecessors. More desirable. Shatterbird had fallen far, but she hadn’t fallen forever. She’d lived through the death of an Endbringer, and oh, what Red would’ve taken to see that. Her cheeks flushed. They weren’t human, they would never be human, and they never had been human, and they were so powerful. 

“Alright,” Cherish said, exasperated. “Shatterbird, you want to see too? Bonzi's been downloading the footage from as many of our fights as she can find for Bonesaw’s clones.” 

Shatterbird didn’t move, but Cherish felt the curiosity from her as clear as if she’d asked the question.

“Did nobody tell you we were making a clone army?” 

Even more confusion, with a bit of surprise, followed by understanding as she refocused her vision on the columns of cryogenic tubes and mess of materials in the lab. Then, pleasure at the idea. Not as much about seeing her dead colleagues. More about the impact it would have on the world, and, specifically, Cherish assumed, Abyssal. Regent was dead, Weaver was part of the team hunting them, and Foil was here, which was probably going to be worse than death, but the rest of that team was still alive. They’d let her suffer for months, paralyzed and played with like his toy. Far from her to deny someone the little pleasures in life, she supposed. Especially when those pleasures involved fucking up something of her brother’s. 

She pulled up the photos on her phone, and Shatterbird forced herself to move. She floated, shuddering from side to side as she did, disconnected from her emotions. Red followed, practically the opposite. Red’s flesh was her wants, the perpetual hunger painted in her movements as she hooked lines of dark red like veins through Night Hag’s body. 

-

They were surrounded. 

It was a massacre. But not for them. 

March swung her blade and cut through one of the dozens of shitty forcefields, shattering it with the force of her heft alone and slicing through the young Chinese cape who sheltered behind it, cutting deep into her chest as it exploded. She cried out as she fell, and another took her place, boiling with heat that drove March back, towards a field laser fire that she dodged with a grin. 

Glass shards snuck through and around the enemy ranks, cutting at exposed points. Fear and doubt slowed their reactions, even if discipline meant they didn’t collapse or flee altogether. The landscape twisted, keeping the grounded Nine on level footing with their airborne opponents, even as each manifestation of Night Hag’s form were sniped by laser fire. Blood rolled across the battlefield, twisting and intertwining into shapes. Waves of telekinetic energy blasted individuals backwards with a force strong enough to shatter skulls unenforced by force fields.

Most of them rode Bitch’s dogs, swollen past point of reason. They were all thick knots of muscle, arched bone spurs, and fangs. Foil cried out as a bolt from her new crossbow slammed through waves of forcefields, bailing an opponent in the eye. She rode Huntress like the wind, swift and untouchable. The two were in sync. When Huntress rose, she leaned. She didn’t dance between soldiers with perfectly timed blows and cut after cut of laser fire sliced back open, but her blows landed hard and precise. 

Cherish held on for dear life to her mount, drinking in the chorus of disciplined soldiers. Her body burned, pushed past all reasonable limits, but she was a master of burying pain. Muscles ached from abuse, even as they refused to tear. Blood leaked from a particularly bad gash on her thigh. She focused on projecting emotions, rather than feeling her own. Just because the brainwashed Yàngbǎn’s emotions were muted and fucked up to the point they didn’t run didn’t mean her power wasn’t having an effect. They slowed as the battle wore on, even as the Nine were refreshed by it. The entire group composition shifted in response to a Mandarin word Bonzi didn’t bother translating. March leapt onto Honeybun, swerving her head in time to avoid an energy blade. 

Tori caught the eye of a heavy set man who was granting the group their heat manipulation, and his allegiances shifted. He _belonged_ to them. The switch was disorientating enough that he didn’t see the blood seeping into his injuries and snaking across her body to his nose and mouth. When he did, he was confused because he felt like he belonged and didn’t teleport away, even as his danger sense blared. 

“T-minus fifteen minutes till the D-squad shows,” March warned, in between breaths, and pulled a Bonzi-designed whistle to her lips. She blew it as she ducked down. Honeybun reared upwards in response after the wave of Yàngbǎn teleported, imposing legs seemingly about to smash down on the ribcage of an errant cape who revealed himself to be an illusion. At the peak of Honeybun’s arc, March tossed three rubber balls from her non dominant hand at one of the remaining intact Bejing buildings, letting each of them bounce three times before they exploded at just the right angle.

Shatterbird sent a wave of glass that she’d been gathering from a recently collapsed skyscraper through the group. They teleported before it cut too many down of them, thanks to the danger sense, but they landed too close to March’s timebombs. The temporarily invincibility that left them frozen in place didn’t shield from her secondary, and Foil fired twice, sniping the cape providing that invincibility with a bullet to each eye.

“Ready to reconsider your stance on negotiating with terrorists?” Bonzi asked in perfectly fluent Mandarin, and she laughed. 

“You’re AB+, right?” Red asked, hollering at Cherish as she leaped towards Skinny’s back. She grabbed ahold of one bone spike successfully, even as another cut a deep gash across her wrist.

“Bonesaw,” Cherish replied with an aggressive nod and a jolt of confirmation towards Red’s emotions, her hands white as she held on for dear life. Red pulled the fresh blood from her wrist and sent it towards the open wound on Cherish’s leg. She couldn’t repair the muscle damage, especially not from some sort of power that'd pierced through Bonesaw's protections, but she scabbed over the injury. Appreciation and affection blossomed in Red’s chest. 

Shatterbird looked glorious. Night Hag’s distortions pulled the Yàngbǎn down to Earth but left her unaffected. Waves of multicolored glass cascaded around her, moving in radiant patterns that blinded anyone who stared too close to her. Turbulence still pounded in her chest, guilt and doubt, but those were constants nowadays. Above that was happiness and pride. She was still herself. Still powerful. This was her return. She was in control, free to act out her impulses. She smiled and frowned and cut, just to show she still could. The city bled for her freedom. She was real, she was there, she was with family, fighting for herself-

Was she? 

_She was._ The answering certainty wasn’t hers, but she let Cherish’s phantom determination wash over her. Glorious battle, especially her triumphant return, wasn’t the time to... what had Bonesaw called her blank space again? Disassociate. This wasn’t the time to disassociate. She was here. The Nine were in China; they could be anywhere.

Almost everyone in this group was foreign to her, in composition and in tactics. She’d fought side by side with Bitch once, and Bonesaw was on their little tinker sabbatical. March was no Jack Slash, Shatterbird knew. Her games were much more specific, with bizarre agendas that left everyone, including Tori, guessing. She’d grown to know Jack over the years, and she could read him like a book. Understanding March would be a fresh challenge, but from what she’d seen so far, it was a challenge she’d accept.

She cut and sliced and flew, triumphant in every moment she controlled her body. She shook the glass that composed her dress with enough intensity to rain the blood that’d caught it across the battlefield. 

—

“Your time’s up,” March said, strolling into Bonesaw’s workshop. Each step of her boots clicked against the tile floor. This world felt wrong without Night Hag infecting every corner of the pocket dimension, a sensation nobody had expected considering how sickening her distortions were. They’d reevaluated their world on the assumption that sounds that were muffled or echoed at odd angles.

Bonesaw sat cross legged on a sofa they’d dragged in from the common area, headphones in and computer on their lap. Their eyes were closed, and the screen was black. They pressed the mute button in response to March’s entrance. A tiny spider crawled across their back before disappearing under their clothes. March arrived right as they’d finished the final checks. Impeccable timing, as always. 

“The clones are ready,” she clarified. 

“No, I get it. I’m just taking a minute to think.” March waited precisely a minute before she approached any further. Bonesaw pulled off their headphones and closed the computer, moving it to the side. They brushed their hair out of their face. Their vision wasn’t limited to their eyes and hadn’t been for some time, but they still did little things like that.

“What’s there to think about?”

“Sometimes I forget you’re kind of crazy,” Bonesaw replied. March grinned, and Bonesaw gave her a thumbs up. Another mechanical spider scurried around her feet before clambering up the sofa with sharpened claws, leaving another set of holes in the upholstery. “The clones will be close enough to forge the same connection to the passenger, so it’s the same person. Thinking like that is a necessity to keep your worldview going. Otherwise your afterlife theory becomes even more horrifying.” 

“It’s not a theory.” She dragged out the syllables in theory and pouted, giving Bonesaw one of her patented unsettling smiles. Bonesaw wasn’t particularly phased. They’d lived with unhinged killers for more than half their life. March might be older, but they were the clear veteran in terms of years a cape. “It’s a fact. And it’s not horrifying. It’s amazing.” 

“If you say so.” 

If she was right, and the data suggested she was, Bonesaw was glad they weren’t a cluster. They didn’t seek death, but they were okay with it in the broadest of strokes. It sounded peaceful. It sounded like an ending. 

“Come on. You can bring them back. Wake up Jack Slash. I want to meet him.” 

“I will. I know you’ve been patient, and I appreciate it.” 

“I don’t like my clocks being off. I gave you five minutes of being obstinate. Now it’s down to one. Press the button. Wake the king and then King. We can bring them up to speed chronologically.” 

“Have you considered that maybe by saying that, you might irritate me into procrastinating even further?” March opened her eyes wide in mock surprise, and Bonesaw rolled their eyes, sending a command to the spider by Jack’s tube to flip the switch just as the countdown she’d installed out front went off. “Damn, you _are_ good.”

“Twit,” she said, stepping forward to playfully rub her fists against Bonesaw's skull. "I'm the best."

—

“We need to address Contessa,” the Siberian said, the words coming from her body’s mouth. She wrapped herself around the scrawny form. 

“Absolutely a primary target, if my power really can kill Scion before he realizes. My history with the Endbringers suggests it should,” Foil replied. She held hands with March, who had Tori on her other side. She tightened her grip to get her other half’s attention. “The timing of the Number Man and Contessa’s appearances still suggest Cauldron thinks we’ll set Scion off, right? That hasn’t changed?” 

March nodded affirmation. Foil’s intuition on such subjects tended to be pretty spot on, but she couldn’t ask specific questions and get answers in the same way March could. 

“We need to get her into Jack or Hatchet Face’s range. It goes without saying I’m on the trigger for the media blast, and that should draw her out, but the specific location…” March continued. “It’ll be easier to lure her into Jack’s range than Hatchet Face. The Siberian and I compared notes, and she should have a path warning her about power negaters active at all times,” Harbringer said. “It should matter for Jack, since his trump power is subtler. Cherish might need to incentivize him to stick with the plan, though.” 

“All these maps make me miss Doormaker,” the Siberian’s body said. She growled with through her own vocal cords to punctuate the sentence. It was disconcerting to see, especially for the Nine who’d only known her projection. Bitch wasn’t looking in her direction. Bonesaw, who’d known about it, wanted to crawl out of their skin. 

Shatterbird, Grey Boy, and Red sat together on the far end of the pile of maps. Officially, their grouping was because they were Cauldron capes who retained their memory. That didn’t explain the large gap between them and the others. Shatterbird wasn’t afraid of Grey Boy because she was an emotional wreck who was only just piecing herself together and mistakenly believed sticking close to someone who reminded her of her traumatic experience would somehow fix her. Red was another honorary Vasil, and she didn’t even have cluster dynamics fucking with her head. 

March and Foil were the next closest, and they didn’t make excuses to avoid him like everyone else did. Their advanced sense of timing probably meant they could break out of his loops, though nobody wanted to test that. Cherish kept tabs on the team of thinkers and those in the know about Cauldron. It took effort to keep their egos from clashing, especially when it came to March. 

“Me too,” Harbringer said, though his memories of being with Caudron were weirder, mostly from dreams. “Using this place as a hub is going to be impractical without serious renovation, and that’ll leave Mannequin with less training than the rest of us.” 

Right then, Mannequin was working on finishing up the training arena. Damsel of Distress and Winter were waiting impatiently for him to finish, while Crawler had refused to wait at all. It’d taken the Siberian finally kicking his ass to get him to wait, mostly because she’d mauled him badly enough March knew it would take nine more hours and twenty three more minutes for him to get in fighting shape. Mannequin worked, seemingly unfazed by the conflict. 

Screamer was trying to get a bead on as many important figures and people the reformed Nine would probably end up fighting as she could, looking through footage of old fights that’d Bonzi compiled and modified. Earlier, Cherish had been helping identify various members of the expanded Nine. Their powers synergized nicely, which Jack Slash hadn't been anticipating. There were dozens of pleasant surprises like that.

Speaking of Jack, he was sitting on the fanciest chair he could find. Damsel of Distress, King, Shatterbird, and March had similar, equally fancy chairs, and they were all wearing their own crowns. Shatterbird, at least, was happy to be referred to as a lady in the ‘court’ of the Slaughterhouse, but the other four had intentions of leading the reunited family. 

Blasto was still alive, and Bonesaw had let him loose a while ago. The combination of watching the two years unfold, utterly powerless, and Cherish’s powers left him little more than a broken shell who followed any order given to him to the letter. 

Breed had his own locked room, which the clone of Skinslip was just leaving. Apparently his minions didn’t need skin. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Bonesaw had created some sort of device to drain the blood, and there was two vats filling up with it, one in Crimson and Winter’s quarters and one in Carnal’s. Red was contributing to them, when she wasn't busy hitting on people.

Tinker tools were everywhere, and dogs kept stealing just the right tools. If Bitch and Cherish hadn’t basically traumatized Mannequin, he probably would’ve snapped and killed one of them already. Most of the gear from the Toybox that Bonesaw and Bonzi couldn’t or wouldn’t use had been locked in a storage room for the past two years. Apparently the experience of being dead and cloned gave the resurrected members of the Nine so much inspiration. 

“Could we get Nilbog on our side?” Bonesaw suggested. “I’ve been curious about his creations, and what’s better than a celebratory reemergence of one Class S threat timed with wrap up of an Endbringer attack but _two_ Class S threats timed with the wrap up of an Endbringer attack?” 

“Maybe we should’ve gone for multiple clones,” March mused. “We could get our plans done much more efficiently.” 

“I feel like that’d lead us to devalue each individual and act recklessly,” Bonesaw said. “You know what they say about splitting the party. A lot of the deaths were from times we were split up.”

“We’ll have eighty one if we can recruit Nilbog and if you include Blasto,” the Number Man mused. “That’s a good amount. It's nine times nine, and eight plus one also equals nine, so it's three nines.”

March shot him a glare and opened her mouth.

“Don’t make me separate you two,” Cherish said, stepping over to the group from where she’d been chatting with Red. The two thinkers hadn’t said anything that indicated an argument was on its way yet, but she recognized the tell tale signs of thinkers with too much in common about to bicker about their specialities.

Not all of the clones had officially joined in their first life. An Amy clone, for example, was checking Bonesaw’s work, doing her best to smooth over anything that looked like it might self destruct. She’d woken up with the same rules about brains, but she’d talked it through with Jack and a couple others, who’d managed to make her reconsider. 

Her experiences matched the original enough that the passenger developed along similar paths, but there were subtle differences. She healed slower and was better at creating new structures all together, and Cherish pointed out she was arguably quicker to spiral and slash or run away from her problems, worse at compartmentalizing and repressing. Bonesaw’s encounter with the original Amy had been short weeks after Brockton Bay was attacked by Leviathan, after all, and before that, she’d apparently had some sort of traumatic run in with Tattletale. Not an uncommon experience, if Bitch’s complaints were anything to go by. 

They’d tried to make a Noelle but information on the Travelers was scarce. In fact, most of the secondary capes they’d managed to clone were heroes, like Amy, the slightly terribly renamed Mouse Attacker, and Chase, or Case 53s without as many secrets, like Acheron. 

Bonesaw had thought about making a Defiant- she’d certainly collected enough DNA from the handful of times her teammates had managed to make the fucker bleed, back when he was still able to, and he’d done enough interviews that Shatterbird called him an attention hog, but she hadn’t gone through with it. Too many bad memories; his team was responsible for all of the deaths under March’s leadership and the three right before. 

Besides, too many tinkers around and things start getting weird. The five tinkers— Blasto included— along with Amy, whose power was conducive to helping out were periodically splitting off from their other tasks to work on a self-sufficient, reproducible data processing device that was some sort of cape calculator made of flesh. Nobody knew what it could do, least of all the people who’d made it. Adding superhumanly advanced efficiency into that mechanism… well. It probably wouldn’t make things easier to understand, that was for sure.

-

Bonzi finished compiling the info-bomb. It was a dense file. If they were chasing who to clone based on contributions to the Nine’s apocalyptic game plan, she would’ve argued to include a defiant code. She’d coded the files to be simple to access for the most computer illiterate and organized the data as best as she could, but she didn’t know a single soul there who would chose to be selective, herself included. 

Most of them were prone to long speeches and five pages of shitty philosophy before they as much as considered getting to the point. Either that or they didn’t talk at all. The info-bomb was one of the first pieces in the overly complicated plan, and it was one that nearly everyone agreed was a good idea. It held the group’s knowledge on the most sensitive subjects, notably lacking certain pieces of context.

It brought up Cauldron, the Triumverate’s corruption, and the Siberian’s connection to them, but it didn’t include all the times the Simurgh interfered with them, pushing the organization to commit more atrocities or compromising them. They would drop secret identities in extended lists that included addresses and names of extended family members that mattered to them, with Alexandria at the top.

With some prompting, Shatterbird spilled details she’d overheard about what Abyssal was up to; three of them were illegal immigrants from Aleph, two of who were passing back and forth to take part in Endbringer fights. Another cape from that same group, the old Travelers, had survived and was working with Amy’s original self, according to some shared memories, and Bonzi had included that under the section detailing New Wave’s many problems. 

It’d taken weeks of careful interviews, cross referencing with thinkers, and editing to work the data into something coherent. March and Harbringer might’ve corrected her on the timelines and numbers, but they’d also insisted on using ridiculously precise units of measurements when whether she rounded to the tenths or to the ten thousandths place probably didn’t affect how people felt about large scale human experimentation. Damsel of Distress, despite claiming to be over Accord screwing her over when challenged, had gone on for half an hour about what she would do to everyone who’d ever faulted her by siding with Cauldron. Coaxing memories out of the clones was a process Cherish excelled at, but she was busy keeping the team from tearing itself apart with her power more often than not. 

Bonzi had checked the numbers. It wasn’t true the volatility of an average group of capes increased exponentially for each additional member. They were simply difficult to manage. The Nine, however, were very much not an average group of capes, and the data from the extended team suggested it might be true for them. 

Just like nonpowered serial killers, they liked to escalate and hated inactivity. March was making sure to emphasize the end of the countdown was coming soon, especially when some of the more restless members were around. She knew how long it’d take for things to get to a breaking point. It was a sign in favor of Dinah’s prophecy that the deadline she’d given for reactivating was one day after the next Endbringer appearance and three days from when Jack learned about it. 

It was two nights before the end of the world as she knew it, and Bonzi was privately curious how much worse the conflict could get, without passing March’s understanding of ‘too much.’

Screamer had kept everyone up one night, hiding in the corner of Bonzi's lab and singing The Most Annoying Song In The World, until Bonesaw found her and stuck her with enough tranquilizer to kill two separate adult elephants and probably their kid too. Crawler’s search for dangerous weapons hurt him so badly he nearly died again, not once, not twice, but seven whole times. The Siberian was just a start. Fortunately for everyone involved, Grey Boy had decided to ignore his attempts at provocation in favor of playing board games, and that’d gotten Crawler to settle down. 

Grey Boy kicked the asses of anyone he played, partially if not entirely because most everyone who retained some semblance of sanity were terrified shitless of him. The Screamer and Cherish team managed to do surprisingly well at chess, probably because the two of them were using Mannequin’s tech to play him from other different side of the room. Hatchet Face tried to play as well, but it took forever to teach him the rules to anything fun, and Grey Boy wasn’t particularly patient, especially when it came to someone who made him vulnerably by existing. 

It wasn’t like Bonzi was immune to the shenanigans. The tinker team had their own ways of screwing with the rest of the Nine. She’d declared an emergency with the pocket dimension when things seemed quiet and watched everyone panic for a good five minutes, while the lie detectors and other tinkers stole the best seats. 

Ultimately, the group was getting along better than she’d expected. The first few days were awkward as all hell, lots of introductions of the ‘friend, meet my other friend’ variety, but nobody was dead. At least, nobody that mattered. Her beta readers and editors kept disappearing, and Bonzi was ninety nine percent sure it wasn’t because they’d somehow escaped the chains she’d wrapped them in and the pocket dimension. 

Right after the first one went missing, Grey Boy started spending a suspiciously higher amount of time in his soundproof room and the remaining ones refused to say what’d happened, even on pain of being given to Bonesaw. The second was messier— the Siberian left his torso behind. Bonzi knew it was the Siberian because she saw her sheepishly chewing on his arm only an hour later. She’d discovered King had made her research assistants his pawns when one started bleeding from a bullet wound after Winter shot him, seven rooms away.

Bonzi had started with twelve. She still didn’t know who was responsible for the third and fifth disappearances. That was the problem with living surrounded by thirty four other serial mass murderers or clones modified to fit in with them, she thought to herself. There was no point looking for a motive. They all had one. Even Hatchet Face was a suspect, since pressure of being kidnapped by the Nine might very well cause a trigger event. 

She sighed. Only one of her assistants remained. They were limp from emotional exhaustion, but they weren’t asleep. Their eyes were mostly on Bonzi, but they flickered to the doorway every now and then. The chains were the only thing keeping them in position. 

An alert popped up on her computer. Everything was ready to go. It didn’t matter if there were a couple of typos, but she’d been particular about it anyway. The surviving assistant had been the best at finding them, which is why when she’d found Screamer casually listening to the last three, she’d said they were off limits until the project was done, a message she’d passed on to the others. The tenth started begging her to kill him shortly after. Bitch came in to complain about the noise and honored his request. She’d even helped drag away the corpse to Breed’s room.

“You’ve survived a lot, haven’t you?” Bonzi said, amused. They barely raised their head. “I’ve heard about meeting the in-laws, but I didn’t expect the family reunion to get this wild. They couldn’t stay indoors for three weeks.” 

She examined them. She’d mostly restrained from hurting her assistants, with the exception of a couple broken bones and beatings for missing obvious mistakes or spending too long digesting the shock to their worldviews, and she’d gotten Amy to fix most of the damage quickly after so it wouldn’t accidentally kill someone. But those had all been the constructive sort of violence, or, at least, excusable in the context. She’d lost her temper and control of her bloodlust. She’d waited all this time to really get down to business.

The survivor would be an appetizer, she decided. A palette cleanser, from all the intense tinkering. They were someone who thought they’d lost all hope, and she was curious to find out if that was true. 

“Wait one moment,” she smiled.

-

It was the last night. Bonesaw perched on the top of a sofa. It’d be a precarious position for a normal person, but they’d long since secured their sense of balance. 

Jack came up behind them. 

“You ever think about leaving this behind?” they asked. “Finding an empty world and just... living?” 

“Yeah,” he admitted. He leaned his folded arms against the same sofa. For once, he didn’t stim with his knives. He picked at his nails a bit instead. Bonesaw had aged. They’d let their hair grow out even further, and the line of tattoos stretched halfway down their back. Jack had gone with a subtler reminder of his fallen peers. 

He’d spent the last week getting to know everyone, training, and planning. The idea of formal exercises was alien to the Nine, and the extended group had nearly torn itself apart on twelve different occasions so far. Bonesaw had made the right choice in cloning Panacea too. At least five of their family would be dead for the second time. Every now and then, the handful of Protectorate, Wards, and foreign heroes they’d converted over the years would try to set something up that wasn’t a blatant 

All of his family was back, and he didn’t want to lose them again. But he didn’t know them either. They were growing and changing in different ways than their originals had. Even those who hadn’t died had lived two years with their reputation diminished. March kept them alive, but she’d hung back. Her sense of timing meant each strike was surgical and ruthlessly precise. She’d left devastation in their wake, but she wasn’t _Jack Slash_. The fatality rate of members had dropped significantly, if not entirely, with the caveat that they dodged confrontations with the big guns more often than not. 

She played her own games.

The unspoken war for leadership had ended in an honest conversation, as boring as that had been. Hatchet Face and Cherish had moderated. King bowed out early, seeing how the Nine had changed into an entirely different beast without him. 

Damsel of Distress had claimed the title of Queen, and Jack let her take the most superficial sort of charge. He would be the Sir Jack Slash, Diplomat and Director of Festivities and March would be the General. She’d also claimed to now be the Director of Cultural Sensitivity, but he was pretty sure she was joking. Pretty sure— it was hard to tell with her. Cherish thought of the girl as a sister, which said everything he needed to know and more. 

Jack wore a claymore across his back, and his shirt was only partially buttoned up, leaving his patchwork skin exposed. An old injury twinged with phantom pain; it was a bullet wound in his abdomen. The skin had closed before Bonesaw could get to him. They’d cut the wound back open to dig out the bullet, but Eidolon cut in before they’d finished, so Burnscar had cauterized their wound instead. It was a souvenir from their trip to Montreal. Cherish had really stepped up to the plate in that encounter, driving him off with a crippling wave of disappointment. 

Bonesaw wore a too-small tattered hoodie with some illegible tourist slogan about keeping Brockton Bay weird. An ironic gift from March, after their third visit left the city re-fucked up. They’d kept shaving away any signs of gender, but they’d let their age show in other ways. They were taller, and their eyes were heavier, somehow. They wore fewer new scars than Cherish and Bitch but the older ones looked starker. The edges of their memorial tattoos were visible beneath their tight shirt. The lower ones worked around where their skin was distorted with a permanent blister from where Legend’s laser beams sliced. 

The two old friends let their doubts sit. 

“The passengers are making us fight,” they admitted. Their fists were clenched, but now they released them. A knot in their chest unwound, just by saying it. “Artificial conflict drives.” 

Jack took a moment to digest the idea. 

“And?” 

“I don’t know. I don’t think I could stop it without getting rid of our powers all together. It’s tied into the Manton Effect. Bonzi included it in the info-bomb when I told her, but I don’t think she processed the implications. I’m not sure I processed it either. Shouldn’t it freak me out, that my actions aren’t entirely my own?” 

“Human nature is already violent. It makes sense that the more powerful we get, the more willing we are to use that power,” Jack replied. 

“Hey,” Bonesaw said, dragging out the syllables lazily as they stared him down. “Has anyone ever told you... that you’re an idiot?”

He laughed lightly. He was much better at tolerating good natured ribbings these days, which surprised most of the clones. They’d missed his existential crisis right after he’d woken up, and the extensive lecture from Cherish, plus bitch-slap-from-Bitch, he’d needed to pull himself together. 

“Not many. Screamer, Bitch... you, sometimes. The default insult of the rabble tends to be crazy, and people who know better don’t talk for long enough to attack us.” 

They stood in the comfortable silence. Despite being a total non-sequitur, Jack’s response reassured Bonesaw. The passengers were another piece of the puzzle but not the entire picture. Jack was here, and he was real. His hands were warm, and his smile was gentle when he looked at them.

“I don’t think we’re coming out of this alive,” Bonesaw confessed, and Jack placed a hand on their shoulder. They twisted to look him in the eyes, vulnerability and pride in equal measure. “All this work to resurrect the dead. I won’t delude myself into thinking the heroes won’t find a way to destroy this place eventually, and I don’t think I can go back to losing someone every couple months. It’s been the end of an era. And… I’m okay with that. I’m okay with what happens next.”

“Save the world from an alien menace just so we can destroy it ourselves. Whistleblow on the biggest conspiracy in history, start a hundred different civil wars in the process. Leave them wondering why for as long as humanity survives.” 

Bonesaw nodded, leaning into his arm. Their seventeenth birthday was a couple of weeks ago. They hadn’t told anyone, but he’d made them a cupcake anyway. Red velvet, with cream cheese frosting, just as they liked them. It wasn’t particularly good — he’d applied the frosting with his power, leaving cuts in the cake, and they were relatively sure he’d used a couple tablespoons more sugar than he was supposed to. He could’ve easily asked Mannequin or Shiver, who were both fantastic chefs to help, but he’d made it himself. He’d used his power without being defined by it. As silly as it was, that cupcake was why they hadn’t pressed the passenger issue. 

“I listened to a lot of the podcasts about us while I worked. Watched the documentaries and read the books too. Shatterbird used to talk about them, but I don’t think she actually read any of them. It was about their existence, more than their quality.”

“Are they any good?” 

“They ran the gamut. Lots of them turned out to be glorified lists with bullet points for each members. I liked _What Happened in Brockton Bay_ the most, even if it wasn’t entirely about us. Lots of inside details on the Travelers and New Wave. We might’ve shattered them for good, but apparently there were massive cracks before hand." Jack shook his head, sarcastically aghast at the idea of a piece of non-fiction that didn’t attribute _all_ the problems the modern cape world faced to him directly. Or maybe sincerely. They had trouble reading him. “My point is, we’re already legends, and all legends end. They either go up in a blaze of glory or they fade away." 

"Let’s give them something to remember.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things I Might Elaborate On:  
> \- How things went down differently in Brockton Bay  
> \- March's leadership  
> \- Post-Slaughterhouse 9000  
> Things I Will Never, Ever Elaborate On  
> -Alexandria/the Siberian


End file.
